American literature is going through quite a bit of trouble right now. difficult period. Even so: American literature is now experiencing. She worries that for several years now she has discovered in herself a shameful lack of voices other than the voice of a cisgender white man and a cisgender white housewife, and, of course, is looking for something to fill this lack. The #weneeddiversebooks book campaign is only in its third year, but things have already made significant progress. dead center. For example, the black writer Paul Batey received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for his novel The Sellout. Centaurs. The same award this year was given to the luxurious Louise Eldritch, who, along with Sherman Alexie, holds a flimsy literary defense for all Native Americans (Alexie for the Spokane Indians, Eldritch for the Ojibwe). The American writer of Vietnamese origin, Viet Thanh Vinh, who unearthed the Vietnam War from the other side, received the Pulitzer Prize - such, you know, a voice from under a band-aid.
In general, little by little other voices began to be heard from bookstores. However, since all this is still beginning, mixing and emerging, so far, books in the form of a cry have worked best for BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) authors. We will leave all sorts of nuances, subtleties and hidden lyricism to the fat times, but for now: “- How many swords do we have?! - And we have Pitchforks!” - that's what it is summary many books that are now becoming important to American literature.
So, Colson Whitehead’s novel took its reader not with the complexity of the novel’s internal structure, but literally with a pitchfork. The story is very simple, and if you have read Gulliver's Travels, you will find it even simpler. Slave Cora escapes from a plantation where an evil master roasted slaves and hung them in cages to discourage others. Cora manages to escape using the underground railroad, which in Whitehead's novel becomes a real underground road, with rails, cars and stops. Cora and her escape partner, Caesar, face many misadventures, from the scary to the Swiftian absurd. Using their example, Whitehead will talk about many important milestones in the history of American slavery and subsequent segregation, including, for example, the Tuskegee experiment - a study of syphilis that was carried out on the poor African-American population without their knowledge.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of this book, but one cannot help but admit that in “The Underground Railroad,” for all its straightforwardness and simplicity, there is hidden a huge, burning feeling of rage, which is the locomotive that pulled the novel to a huge number of prizes and awards. , from the Pulitzer to the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best fantasy novel. The book can be simple and cardboard in places, it can be uncomplicated and similar to propaganda poster, but if there is even a drop of real feeling in it, it will live and attract readers. In Whitehead's novel there is a whole sea of this real feeling, and if you live with Cora until the very end of her journey, then in the finale this sea literally splashes out at your feet, and you understand that all this was not read in vain, even if only for the sake of the last two pages.
Underground Railway (English) The Underground Railroad) - designation of a secret system used in the United States to organize escapes and transfer of black slaves from the slave states of the South to the North. It operated until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861.
The various routes taken by groups of fugitives began from the borders of the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, Maryland and led to the Northern states, as well as Canada. The “Underground Railroad” had its own organization - it had its own “conductors” (senior escorts in groups), “stations” (housing provided by sympathizers for fugitives on the way for rest and shelter).
The greatest participants in the organization of the Underground Railroad were activists of the abolitionist movement, free blacks and mulattoes, Quakers and Baptists. During the period from 1830 to 1861, more than 60 thousand slaves were transported to the North and given freedom along this route. The most distinguished were Thomas Garrett, who helped more than 2,200 slaves escape, and the black woman Harriet Tubman, who made 19 “travels along the road” and freed approximately 300 slaves.
Literature
- Foster W. “Negro people in the history of America”, M., 1955
- Still W. "The Unterground Railroad", Phil., 1879
- Siebert W.H. The Unterground Railroad, N.Y. 1898
- Preston E.D. "Genesis of the Unterground Railroad" (J. of Negro History, 1933, vol. 18).
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.
- Underground boat (disambiguation)
See what the "Underground Railroad" is in other dictionaries:
UNDERGROUND RAILWAY- (“Secret Railroad”, more precisely “Underground Railroad”, Underground Railroad) the name of the secret system of organizing escapes of black slaves from the southern slave states of the United States to the North, existed before Civil War(see CIVIL... ... encyclopedic Dictionary
UNDERGROUND RAILWAY- (Secret Railroad) the name of a secret system for organizing the escape of black slaves from the southern slave states of the United States to the north. In the 30s and 60s. 19th century with her help, approx. 60 thousand slaves... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
Underground Railroad- (Underground Railroad), a secret organization in the United States to assist slaves fleeing the South in the years leading up to the American Civil War. Although P.zh.d. could only help a small number of slaves (approx. 1 thousand per year after 1850), it fed... ... The World History
Underground Railroad- (“Underground Railroad”) Secret Railroad, the name of a secret system for organizing escapes of black slaves from the southern slave states of the United States; existed before the Civil War 1861 65. “P. and. d." had “stations” (citizens’ houses,... ...
"Underground Railroad"- (“Secret Railroad”), the name of a secret system for organizing the escape of black slaves from the southern slave states of the United States to the North. In the 30s and 60s. XIX century with its help, about 60 thousand slaves were freed... encyclopedic Dictionary
"UNDERGROUND RAILROAD"- a name adopted to designate a secret system of organizing escapes of black slaves from southern slaveholdings. US states; existed before civil war 1861 65. P. zh. d. had stations (houses of citizens who sympathized with the fugitives, where they stayed in... ...
Railway or cable car tram- Railway, or tram on a cable traction (there is no established Russian term, the title of the article was chosen by analogy with the English cable car “cable car”) view rail transport, close to the funicular... Wikipedia
The Secret Railroad- (“Secret Railroad”), a name found in literature for a secret system for organizing escapes of black slaves from the southern slaveholding states; the more common name is "Underground Railroad"... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
"THE SECRET RAILWAY"- see Underground Railroad... Soviet historical encyclopedia
City railway- The request "Stadtbahn" is redirected here; see also other meanings. This article lacks links to sources of information. Information must be verifiable, otherwise it may be questioned and deleted. You can... Wikipedia
Chernyakov A.
The Underground or Underground Railroad is a secret organization in the United States that organized the escape and transportation of black slaves from the slave states of the South to the North. The organization operated in the 19th century until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. The ideologists of this organization were the abolitionist movement, Quakers and free blacks. The Underground Railroad was so called not because it used tunnels or trains (neither were used), but because its members used railroad terminology.
On this road there were certain routes or “lines” along which fugitive slaves moved. These routes began from the borders of the states of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Georgia and led to the northern states and Canada.
This society had a fairly clear organization: there were so-called. “conductors” or “conductors” (senior escorts in groups), “stations” (accommodation provided by sympathetic “station masters” for runaway black slaves en route for rest and shelter). The distance between "stations" was usually about a day's travel. There were also “shareholders” who provided financial assistance. Slaves were called either “commodity” or “cargo.” The railway itself was known as the “freedom train”, which rushed to “paradise” or the “promised land” - Canada. For slaves there was also provision new clothes, and after more than 300 slaves were freed, a special clothing “shop” was opened for runaway blacks.
Although the road was called “railroad,” boats, ships, carts, and often just walking were used for transportation. They moved in small groups. There was always a “conductor” with the group, who knew the way and had to deliver the fugitives from one “station” to another. Usually they moved along the lines in the dark, covering 10-20 miles (15-30 km) during the night. In the morning, the fugitives arrived at the next station, where they hid all day. And the next night everything was repeated until the slaves entered free territory. That was very dangerous business. If caught, both guides and slaves faced severe punishment or death.
Information about the "railroad", "routes" and "stations" was kept secret. Therefore, it was created secret language communication. For example, the phrase: “I sent 4 large and 2 small sticks of sausage for 2 hours” meant that 4 adults and 2 children set off from Harrisburg to Philadelphia.
Southern newspapers were filled almost every day with announcements of new slave escapes, with large rewards offered for their capture. Was even created special squad professional fugitive hunters who caught them and returned them to their owner. But if the slave managed to get to the Canadian border, then the persecution ended.
However, “moving” to new places of residence was not always pleasant former slaves: difficulties arose in finding and getting a job, in particular due to massive European immigration, racism flourished.
For the period from 1830-1861. along this route it was possible to transport more than 60 thousand slaves to the North and give freedom. According to other estimates, about 100,000 people were released. The most large group fugitives settled in Upper Canada, where communities were established "African Canadians » . About 1,000 more refugees settled in Toronto, and several villages appeared in which ex-slaves lived. This society also had its heroes. Most distinguished Thomas Garrett, who helped more than 2,200 slaves escape, and a black woman Harriet Tubman, who made 19 “travels along the road” and freed approximately 300 slaves, including her sister, brother and parents.
She knew how to change her appearance very well, dressing up either as a harmless old woman or as a mentally ill old man. Not a single slave Tubman conducted was caught. African Americans heading north called it their “Moses,” and the Ohio River, which separated slave states from free states in some parts of the country, “the Jordan River.” A $40,000 reward was offered for Tubman's capture.
But a compromise in 1850 led to the passage of a tougher fugitive slave law. The law introduced new position special commissioners authorized to execute claims of slave owners against fugitive slaves in federal court. The law imposed huge fines for helping a runaway slave, as well as for federal officials who did not comply with the terms of the law.
Although there were relatively few agents, "station masters" and "conductors", their efforts freed tens of thousands of slaves. Their boldness and bravery in organizing the Underground Railroad contributed to the growth of anti-slavery sentiment in the North.
During the Vietnam War, the Underground Railroad was revived. This term was conventionally used to describe escape routes to Canada for Americans who were subject to conscription into the US Army for the period of hostilities.
1. Colson Whitehead "The Underground Railroad"
· Pulitzer Prize 2017.
This is a novel about a dark-skinned slave, Cora, who escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia to the north via the Underground Railroad - so in America with late XVIII century was the name of a system of secret trails and shelters designed to rescue slaves and transport them from the South to free states or Canada. In the literal sense, of course, it was neither underground nor railway - it was an underground road along which travelers were transported from station to station by so-called “conductors,” each of whom was responsible only for his own section of the route.
But Whitehead could not resist bringing the metaphor to life, and his Cora ends up on a real railroad, with trains and rails, along which fugitive slaves move, escaping from the thugs pursuing them. The writer’s book killer combines fascination (freedom road! underground trains! chases!) with naturalism, and historical truth with the same unrestrained fiction. Whitehead is never boring, but sometimes he is too nerve-wracking; he doesn’t lie about anything, but his truth is not in the details, but in the situations, in the oppressed position of blacks in America (and not in how to fight it). And we are looking forward to not only the Russian translation of the book, but also the American film adaptation - Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight and the series Dear White People, promised to soon turn it into a series for Amazon.
Viet Tan Nguyen "The Sympathizer"
· Pulitzer Prize 2016.
· To be published by Corpus in 2018.
The most talked about novel of 2016, the victory of which was strange to doubt, a powerful debut American professor of Vietnamese origin. This is an attempt to look at history Vietnam War not from the official, American point of view, but in a completely new way - it’s not for nothing that the novel was deliberately released for the fortieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. And so his heroes, Vietnamese generals, flee to America on the last plane and chill in Los Angeles, and among them sits one communist spy and tries to understand whose side he is on. “The Sympathizer” is a novel about a man “with two consciousnesses”, who is no longer in Asia, but not yet in Europe, who is drawn to benefits Western civilization but didn't forget the horrors eastern war demanding revenge. This is a thriller, a spy novel, a historical fiction and not last resort a book about emigration, as the impossibility of becoming “one of us” on both sides of the border. But this is not what caught the nerve of time - in the era of post-truth, when, thanks to modern media, the reader discovered with horror that he could not get to the truth, this is a novel about how the truth is complex and yet knowable.
Marilynne Robinson - "Gilead"
· The Russian translation by E. Filippova was published in 2016 by the AST publishing house.
· Pulitzer Prize 2005.
On the list of great modern American writers about whom the general public has never heard, Marilynne Robinson ranks honorary first place. She is the author of four novels, 24 years between the first, Housekeeping, and the second, Gilead. Her themes, meanwhile, have not changed - she still writes about the outback, about quiet life, about the saving light of religion, as if it were still the twentieth century, and the public was not accustomed to chasing intellectual prose, but was ready to savor the details Everyday life ordinary people. These are the introductory notes - life is short, ordinary people small towns matter—they are what make Robinson’s prose so rich. This is a kind of sermon about the virtues of the ordinary - especially since “Gilead” is structured as a letter and memoir of a parish priest, who, dying in 1956, writes a memo-instruction to his son.
Richard Russo - Empire falls
· Pulitzer Prize 2002.
· Preparing for publication by the publishing house “Phantom Press” in the translation by Elena Poletskaya in 2018.
A novel that beat out Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections - for this alone, it seems, Rousseau for a long time They refused to translate into Russian, but in vain. Although he is not at all a competitor to Franzen, these novels turn out to be slightly about the same thing - about sunset old America, the loss of the American dream, the collapse of the family, saying goodbye to illusions and the inability to say goodbye to them completely. Empire falls (even if the translator struggles with the pun in the name) is the name of both the town where the action takes place and the eatery run by main character. The establishment belongs to the wealthy owner of the city, Mrs. Whiting, and although the city itself is almost ruined, and the cafe has not been generating income for a long time, the hero believes that one day it will belong to him. And he doesn’t leave - but the reader has to understand what keeps him here, and indeed holds this falling apart world together. In 2005, the novel was filmed by HBO with an absolutely crazy set of star actors (Ed Harris, Hellen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright and Paul Newman) and deservedly received a bunch of awards, including a Golden Globe for best series. But the book also has a more recent cultural reference: if you also think that Louis C.K.’s “Horace and Pete” is a great and underrated series, then read where it comes from.
Richard Ford - "Independence Day"
· Pulitzer Prize 1996
· Published by Phantom Press, translated by Sergei Ilyin.
A few days in the life ordinary person: A former sports journalist turned divorced realtor who takes his son to a baseball game. Ford meticulously, if not “obsessively,” records the lives of his characters, their thoughts, concerns and beliefs, and in his novel they become the main engine of action. This is a book about a midlife crisis, about disappointment in the ideals of the 60s, about lost love and attempts to find oneself. And although the hero here becomes an ordinary modern “confused man,” there is no tragedy in all this - only a feeling of joyful, cheerful recognition and a set of truths for later “writing down and saving.” As always with Ford, the life lived with his heroes becomes its own hymn - it is justified and elevated by the intensity of the experience and the depth of immersion. A grandiose novel, a great and one of the most underrated translations by Sergei Ilyin, who left us in 2017.
Jane Smiley - "A Thousand Acres"
· Pulitzer Prize 1992
It is surprising, of course, that A Thousand Acres has never been translated into Russian, and the whole Jane Smiley has never been translated into Russian either - but if you really want to, you can read it in Ukrainian. Today it just corresponds to the spirit of the times: it is witty, modern prose that finds support in classical stories and myths, and feminist - where would we be without it. A Thousand Acres is literally King Lear set in modern-day Iowa, where an aging father decides to bequeath a farm to his daughters, but excludes the third from the will when, when asked if she is willing to return and farm the land, she replies, “I don’t know.” . But this novel is still not about a lonely madman, wrong decisions, a terrible storm, betrayal and true daughterly love (although it contains all this), but about the earth and its true value— and a little more about the fact that classical tragedies may well be buried in modern dramas.
Annie Proulx "Ship News"
· Pulitzer Prize 1994
· Russian translation by N. Kuzovleva, publishing house "Azbuka"
The owner of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx, is considered a deservedly great author in America, but we still know her best from film adaptations. Her second novel, Shipping News, which won her both the National Book Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, was so wonderfully filmed in the 2000s, starring Kevin Spacey, that you didn't even have to read it at all. But in fact, no: “Ship News” is just a book from mandatory list therapeutic reading. It tells the story of a huge loser who, having lost his parents, wife and job, decides to return to his ancestral homeland of Newfoundland. The story is written without any pink snot or sentimentality, and its message is truly therapeutic: how to stop worrying and become the main character own life? Tie sea knots, watch your hands, don’t get distracted by little things and survive against all odds.
John Kennedy Toole - "A Conspiracy of Dunces"
· Pulitzer Prize 1981
· Published by Eksmo publishing house, translated by Maxim Nemtsov
"Conspiracy of Dunces" - rare case, when the Pulitzer was awarded posthumously, and how: John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969, and for another ten years his mother and the writer Walker Percy (whom she managed to infect with her obsessive confidence in her son’s genius) tried to publish it last novel. And, as it turned out, it was not in vain - when the book was finally published, it immediately received recognition from the public and critics, and still remains an outstanding bestseller and a unique example of American literature.
In "A Conspiracy of Dunces" there are no small towns, no search for oneself, no discussions about American dream and the American past - all topics from which inevitably American novel. But there is a huge hero, Ignatius Riley, who does not fit into any costumes or frames, whose only work is “writing a lengthy indictment of the century.” Sitting in his closet on Constantinople Street in 1960s New Orleans, he washes down his hot dogs with Dr. Pepper and showers everyone around him with elegantly worded contempt.
In non-poetic modernity, Ignatius seems to be a man from the past, monumental in every way - a Gargantua crossed with Don Quixote, an eternal infant with the sharp mind of an 18th-century French thinker. Like the hero of a classic picaresque novel, he is well aware that everything around him is a comedy. “A Conspiracy of Dunces” is a homerically funny book, and at the same time an incredibly sad novel, because the tragic figure of Ignatius, unsuitable for anything in this world, is doomed from the very beginning - and laughing at his remarks and adventures, we cannot help but sympathize with him .
John Cheever - "Stories"
· Pulitzer Prize 1979
· Edition in Russian: collection “Angel on the Bridge”, M.: Text, translation by Tatyana Litvinova
They say about every great writer of short stories that he is the new Chekhov. For example, Alice Munro is Chekhov in a skirt, but John Cheever is Chekhov American outback. At least that's what they once called him. Now about each new writer good stories they say he's the new Cheever. It’s amazing how strangely and fragmentarily it was translated into Russian - in neat doses in Soviet story collections. After all, he’s all about a drama that’s very clear to us. little man— sometimes terribly funny, like a bomb shelter in a garden topped with plaster ducks and bearded garden gnomes.
Cheever is all in such details - absurd, sometimes fantastic: he notices both the state of the world in its smallest details and the possibility of this boring real world become suddenly bizarre and strange. Like in the story “The Swimmer”, the hero of which is going to swim across the area - from someone else’s pool to pool. For Cheever, trouble almost never comes during the course of an action; it has already happened, and you have to figure out what exactly happened and what to do about it now. indirect signs, literally by the way a person looks around him.
Pearl Buck "Earth"
· First edition in Russian: translated by Nina Darouzes in 1934
· Pulitzer Prize 1932
In addition to Pulitzer, Pearl Buck also received the Nobel Prize in 1938, but with the totality of these awards, today, perhaps, no one reads her anymore. Raised in China as the daughter of missionaries, she moved to America as an adult to attend college and considered herself half-Chinese for the rest of her life. And in China they often consider it theirs. Her “Earth” is the story of one Chinese family hard-working peasants who build their prosperity with their own hands, despite locusts, drought and historical changes. With the precision of a traditional novel, Pearl Buck describes how this familiar and clear world and why the ordeals of the heroes will ultimately end in nothing. Those who are crazy about Elena Ferrante should definitely read “Earth” - the same leisurely plot, the same saga stretched out over a lifetime; the heroes for whom you feel the same sympathy are equally not in control of their own fate and historical circumstances.