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Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American philosopher, lecturer and poet, one of the most prominent thinkers and writers in the United States, and the originator of transcendentalism.
Ralph studied at Boston State Latin School and then at Harvard College (later Harvard University), began to preach, but soon doubted his chosen path and resigned his ministry. Emerson went to Europe, where new acquaintances and knowledge led him to new thoughts, and, returning to the United States in 1833, he began writing his famous book "Nature", where he first formulated a philosophy called transcendentalism. Soon other thinkers rallied around him, forming a group of like-minded thinkers.
In the essay "Nature," published in 1836, and in the following works, "The American Scholar" and "An Address in the School of Theology," Emerson consistently developed his ideas. Emerson's doctrine of the self-sufficiency and self-reliance of the individual stems from his view that a person need only look into his own heart to receive the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the prerogative of the official churches. One must then have the courage to be oneself and trust the inner power within oneself, living one's life according to the commandments one has intuitively derived. These thoughts are not new, but Emerson put them in imaginative and accessible language.
Emerson's speeches led to his being ostracized at Harvard for many years. However, the informal Transcendental Club, founded in 1836, was joined and supported by his young students. The world fame of the brilliant thinker Emerson brought his "Essays" in two volumes, published in 1841 and 1844. As the main representative of transcendentalism, Emerson gave direction to the religious, philosophical and ethical movement, which above all emphasized belief in the spiritual potential of each person.
A later work of confession, The Conduct of Life (1860), demonstrates the author's developed humanism and full awareness of human limitations. The voluminous collection of poems cemented Emerson's reputation as a major American poet.
Herman Melville was an American writer, poet, and sailor.
Melville's hardship-filled youth ended on a whaling ship. He returned from his adventures in the South Seas in October 1844, and wrote "Taipi" the following spring. The book was based on the events surrounding Melville's desertion from the whaling ship Acushnet in 1842 and subsequent adventures in the Marquesas Islands.
Melville wrote several other novels and short stories and many poems, but during his lifetime his works were little appreciated by his contemporaries. Only in the 1920s began to rethink Melville, and he was recognized as a classic of world literature. World fame Melville already in the 20th century brought irrational novel "Moby Dick".
Modest Petrovich Musorgskii (russian: Модест Петрович Мусоргский) was a Russian composer and pianist.
Born into an old Russian noble family, Modest was trained on the piano from an early age, then served as an officer in the Life Guards of the Preobrazhensky Regiment. In 1856-57 Mussorgsky became acquainted with the composer Alexander Borodin, and later with Alexander Dargomyzhsky, Cesar Cui, Mili Balakirev and the music critic Vladimir Stasov. Together they formed a friendly community that became known as the Mighty Handful.
In 1858, Musorgskii left military service and took up only music. Later, however, for the sake of earning money, he was forced to enter the civil service and work in various official positions. In music he tried for a long time to find his own style, experimented a lot, took on different genres. He composed piano and orchestral works, many satirical romances, vocal pictures and songs with vivid characters. Musorgskii's symphonic work Intermezzo (1861) and fantasy Night on Bald Mountain, the cycle of pieces Pictures at an Exhibition, written for piano in 1874 as musical illustrations to Victor Hartmann's watercolors, and the vocal cycle Children's, which included seven pieces, are widely known and often performed.
Musorgskii gradually became popular in Russia and abroad. The pinnacle of Musorgskii's work in the 1860s was his opera Boris Godunov, based on Alexander Pushkin's drama, staged at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg in 1874. In 1872 he almost completed his last opera, Khovanshchina; Sorochinskaya Yarmarka and several other operas remained unfinished.
After Musorgskii's death, his friend the composer Rimsky-Korsakov decided to put all his works in order and publish them. He made many changes to the melodic and harmonic order of the compositions completed by the author, including Boris Godunov.
Aleksandr Konstantinovich Glazunov (russian: Александр Константинович Глазунов) was a Russian late Romantic composer, conductor and teacher.
Glazunov belonged to a well-known dynasty of book publishers in St. Petersburg and showed musical ability early on. He studied music with Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov, wrote his first symphony at the age of sixteen, and was noticed by the patron of the arts Mitrofan Belyaev, who became his admirer and benefactor. Thanks to him, the young Glazunov traveled all over Europe and was introduced in Weimar to Franz Liszt, who promoted the performance of his First Symphony at the congress of the General German Musical Union.
After the death of composer Borodin, Glazunov helped Rimsky-Korsakov finish his opera Prince Igor, and in the late 1890s he was already collaborating with the Imperial Theaters and writing three ballets. In 1899 Glazunov was appointed professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and from the end of 1905 he became its director, retaining this post even after the October Revolution of 1917. Glazunov's personality is characterized by the fact that he spent his director's salary on helping poor students. And in general, during the hungry years of post-revolutionary devastation, he supported students, even if he did not share their musical beliefs - among them the greats Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich.
In 1922, Aleksandr Glazunov was named People's Artist of the young Soviet republic. In 1928 he traveled to Vienna to take part in the jury of the Schubert Centenary Composition Competition and never returned to the USSR. However, even while living in Europe, he retained his Soviet citizenship. Officially, Glazunov's stay in Paris was explained by his serious state of health and the need for medical treatment. Already in 1972 Glazunov's ashes were transported to the USSR and reburied in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.
In addition to ballets, Aleksandr Glazunov wrote eight symphonies (the ninth remained unfinished), seven string quartets and a great deal of orchestral music. He wrote mainly for piano and organ, and at the end of his life he composed works for saxophone - a solo concerto and a quartet for saxophones. Glazunov's most popular works today are his ballets The Seasons (1898) and Raymonda (1897), his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Polonaise from Les Sylphides, and his two concert waltzes.
Nikolai Andreevich Rimskii-Korsakov (russian: Николай Андреевич Римский-Корсаков) was a Russian composer, teacher and conductor, music critic, and member of the Mighty Handful.
Originally from an old noble family, Rimskii-Korsakov studied piano from the age of six and by the age of nine was already trying to compose music. After graduating from the St. Petersburg Naval School, in 1862-1865 he was on a round-the-world voyage, during which he was made an officer. He participated in an expedition to the shores of North America, visited Great Britain, Spain, Norway. In 1873-1884 he worked as an inspector of military bands of the fleet.
During his studies at the school and during the expedition Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov continued to study music. His acquaintance in 1861 with the composer Miliy Balakirev and his circle "The Mighty Handful", which included composers Caesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Alexander Borodin, became the impetus for his work. Rimskii-Korsakov 's aesthetic views and worldview were formed under the influence of the "Mighty Handful" and its ideologist V. Stasov.
Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov was very prolific, and almost all of his works are based on folk and classical Russian literature and melodies. He composed 15 operas, including The Pskovite Girl (1872), May Night (1879), The Snow Maiden (1881), Sadko (1896), The Tsar's Bride (1898), The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900), Kashchey the Immortal (1902), The Tale of the Invisible City of Kitezh..." (1904), The Golden Cockerel (1907). Fragments from some operas have become the most performed in the world, among them "The Song of the Indian Guest" from "Sadko" and "The Flight of the Bumblebee" from "Saltan".
The composer's works also include three symphonies (the first of which he completed while sailing around the world), symphonic works, instrumental concertos, cantatas, chamber instrumental, vocal and sacred music. In 1886-1890 Rimskii-Korsakov conducted the "Russian Symphonic Concertos" in St. Petersburg, and in 1898 - in Moscow, at the same time he was also engaged in teaching. In 1871 he became a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he taught classes in practical composition, instrumentation and orchestration.
As a teacher, Rimskii-Korsakov trained over 200 composers and musicians, including Alexander Glazunov, Mikhail Gnesin, Alexander Grechaninov, Anatoly Lyadov, Sergei Prokofiev, and Igor Stravinsky. He also published several textbooks on harmony and orchestration. Rimskii-Korsakov's work had a great influence on the development of Russian classical and foreign music.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular American poet of the nineteenth century.
Longfellow is one of the most revered poets in the United States. His poems "Paul Revere's Ride", "Evangeline", "The Tale of Acadia" (1847) and "Psalm of Life" were included in elementary and high school curricula and have long been remembered by generations of readers who studied them as children. Longfellow revitalized American literary life by linking American poetry to European traditions outside of England.
John Milton was a British poet and writer-publicist, intellectual and politician of the English Revolutionary period.
Milton first planned to become a priest, studied at Cambridge University, and then abandoned this activity. Several years he spent reading and self-education, learning many languages. In 1638 Milton traveled around the continent for about a year and a half, spending much time in Italy, primarily in Rome and Florence. He befriended young Italian literati, and his encounter with Galileo further influenced his writing.
Milton became best known for his poem Paradise Lost in Ten Books, which declares its purpose to justify the ways of God to man, but also touches on both universal and personal themes. Milton was the first author to use the word "cosmos" in our modern sense of "outer space," and his space epic takes place in a confidently Copernican universe.
In his prose works, Milton advocated the abolition of the Church of England and the execution of Charles I. From the outbreak of the English Civil Wars in 1642 and long after the restoration of Charles II as king in 1660, he spoke out against tyranny and state-sanctioned religion in all his works. As a Protestant, Milton was often in conflict with the Roman Catholic Church. As a civil servant, Milton became the voice of the English Commonwealth after 1649 and then under Oliver Cromwell, conducting international correspondence and defending the government against polemical attacks from abroad.
John Milton is considered the most important English writer after William Shakespeare. Author of political pamphlets and religious treatises, he is one of the most famous writers of the 1650s, the vibrant era of the English Revolution (Civil War).
Mark Twain, real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American humanist writer, journalist, and social activist.
As a young man, Samuel worked in the printing press and in the gold mines, then went on a steamboat trip to Europe and the "Holy Land". His travel letters, full of vivid descriptions and ironic observations, were very well received by the public and were later revised into his first book, Innocents Abroad, published in 1869.
The pseudonym "Mark Twain" first appeared in 1863 under one of Samuel Clemens' short stories, and since then all his significant works have been signed by that name.
A talented storyteller, a peculiar humorist and moralist, Twain knew and loved his many diverse characters. His scandalizers and dreamers, caring aunts and ambitious politicians, grumpy widows and lying aristocrats, cunning but generous slaves, sentimental moralists, brave and naive children - all these types of American people Twain gave voice to thanks to his masterful command of colloquial language, slang and jargon. Twain wrote a lot and in a variety of genres: humor and satire, philosophical fiction and journalism and others, but he always stood on the position of humanist and democrat.
Mark Twain became world famous for his travel stories and adventure novels about his childhood, these are "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1885). Twain is still one of America's, and indeed the world's, best and most beloved writers. His works have been and are still being published in many languages around the world.
Evelyn Waugh, full name Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, was a British satirical writer, travel writer and historian.
Evelyn Waugh studied at Lancing College in Sussex and at Hertford College in Oxford. He then began traveling and writing, soon earning a reputation as a witty satirist. He visited Ethiopia and the Belgian Congo, and traveled to South America. His works are almost always based on personal experience; notable among the early ones are Decline and Fall (1928), Nasty Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), and others.
During World War II, Evelyn Waugh served in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards. Written at this time, the novel "Return to Brideshead" (1945) is about an aristocratic English Roman Catholic family. In the trilogy "Men in Arms" (1952), "Officers and Gentlemen" (1955) and "Unconditional Surrender" (1961), the author conducted a serious analysis of the events of World War II, as an eternal struggle between good and evil, civilization and barbarism. Later on these works were filmed television series.
Evelyn Waugh also left a significant trace in journalism and literary criticism, he is considered one of the finest stylists in English prose of the XX century.
