THE ERA AND BIOGRAPHY OF JEROME K. JEROME: A LOOK FROM THE 21ST CENTURY.

The works of Jerome K. Jerome represent a kind of picture of the life of England at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, written by a witty man, brilliantly owning an ironic style.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the 10s - 20s, critical articles about Jerome K. Jerome appeared in the history of literature in English, German, and French. But for the most part, the work is focused on biographical data about the writer and includes a list of his works.

The purpose of the article is to consider creativity Jerome K. Jerome through the articles of literary critics.

K. Kernagan – an English critic and literary critic – In his book "Celebreties" ("Celebreties", 1923) shows Jerome K. Jerome from different angles, but his work gives more information about the personality of the writer than about his work. The author refers to facts from the life of Jerome, which show him as a witty, sympathetic and benevolent person. K. Kernagan, when analyzing the writer's work, rightly believes that Jerome “is interested in serious problems that he is trying to illuminate in his works, while many of his contemporaries who dare to make fun of him bypass them”. Jerome's works, the English critic does not see the brilliant humor of the writer. K. Kernaghan's article was the last of the significant works that appeared during Jerome's life. For most critics of those years, Jerome K. Jerome remained only a comic writer.

A friend and biographer of the writer A. Moss wrote the first monograph on Jerome K. Jerome in 1928. Therefore, the book provides more information about the personality of the writer than the autobiographical novel of Jerome himself, this is its value. It contains facts from the life and work of the writer. A. Moss quotes fragments of letters from Jerome K. Jerome to R. Stevenson, M. Twain, A. Conan Doyle, reviews of individual works, excerpts from his diary entries, memoirs of people who knew Jerome.

A.Moss not only describes Jerome's life, but also analyzes his work from the point of view of genre and style, which led to the structural division of his monograph: Jerome the playwright, Jerome the humorist, Jerome the serious writer. This approach seems to be fair, as it allows you to determine the originality of a particular genre in the work of Jerome K. Jerome.

The first fundamental study of Jerome's work is the monograph by V. Gutkess “Jerome K. Jerome. His life and work "(" Seine Personlichkeit und literarischeBedeutung ", 1930) - appeared only in 1930. The author tried to consider Jerome's work against the background of the literary and historical phenomena of the era. In reviewing Jerome K. Jerome's autobiography, My Life and Time, he uses a biographical research method. An appeal to the autobiographical novel of the writer helps to understand his philosophical, aesthetic and religious views, to reveal the connection between the biography and the writer's work.

V. Gutkess also summarized and systematized all the available information about Jerome K. Jerome, gave his own assessment of his work and tried to establish the reason for the constant success of Jerome's works among readers and the almost invariable disapproval of criticism. V. Gutkess for the first time analyzes the work of Jerome as a whole, explores in detail the compositional and stylistic features of short stories and essays by Jerome K. Jerome.

Only in the 50s of the XX century, articles about the work of the writer appear in periodicals in different countries. These are short annotations, prefaces devoted to an overview of the work of the English humorist or his individual works, most often the story "Three in a boat, not counting a dog." Basically, these are articles by connoisseurs of Jerome K. Jerome's talent, who compared the satirical orientation of his essays and short stories and the works of J. Swift, or paid attention only to the social problems of individual works of the writer of the period 1890-1910, directed against bigotry, hypocrisy, philistinism characteristic of Victorian society.

For a long time, there was not a single serious study of Jerome K. Jerome's work in Russia.

Modern domestic criticism of Jerome's work is represented by two dissertations and articles written mainly in the genre of prefaces to individual publications of the writer.

The genre nature of "small" prose by Jerome K. Jerome - essays, essays, short stories, short stories and its ideological and artistic originality - is studied in N. Sadomskaya's dissertation "Typology of small genres in the prose of Jerome K. Jerome 1885-1916" (1984). The author reveals the features of Jerome humor, ways of creating a comic. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the composition and humor of the story "Three in a boat, not counting the dog", one of the most striking works of the writer. A separate chapter is devoted to the study of genre typology of Jerome's short stories.

An article by the Russian literary critic M. Urnov (1970) is also devoted to Jerome's work. He talks about the "sameness" of Jerome's hero in different works. Often this hero has an "active nature", but usually his activities do not bring visible results. An interesting remark by M. Urnov about Jerome's style. He writes that a characteristic feature of Jerome's work is the transition of the narrative from everyday trifles, a particular example to an important topic, when "joke is replaced by a thoughtful joke or serious meditation".

A very detailed article by A. Zverev "Jerome's Smile" (1983). The researcher gives an original definition of the genre specificity of Jerome's work: “He made an anecdote as the genre principle of his narration. The anecdote attracted him by the fact that the picture of reality captured here in an unusual perspective contains the grain of a novella, which makes it possible to outline a holistic image of a particular environment”. A. Zverev is the first among Russian researchers who addresses the function of irony in Jerome's creative manner. He notes that Jerome's irony is always condescending, harmless. “He was born a humorist”.

Contemporaries called Jerome's books absurd, his work was defined as a disgrace to English literature, as an attempt to smuggle some kind of "new humor" into it. "Jerome," wrote one London newspaper, "is a sad example of the over-education of the lower classes threatening England." Even comparatively recently, many years after Jerome's death, his name was mentioned with the addition of epithets that were far from flattering: he is de tactless, and his observation is the observation of a philistine philistine, and Three in a Boat is a masterpiece of carriage literature.

References:

1. Джером К. Джером в России : [сайт]. – Текст электронный. – Режим доступа: https://md-eksperiment.org/post/20180112-dzherom-k-dzherom-v-rossii.
2. Джером, Д. К. Моя жизнь и время / Джером Клапка Джером ; [пер. с англ. В. И. Баканова]. – Москва : АСТ, 2014. – 317, [1] с.
3. Маркиш, С. По изд.: Джером К. Джерома [Электронный ресурс] // Избранные произведения : в 2-х т. : пер. с англ. / Сост. и предисл. С. Маркиша ; ил. И. М. Семенов. – Москва : Гослитиздат, 1957. – С. 3–22. – Текст электронный. – Режим доступа: http://19v-euro-lit.niv.ru/19v-euro-lit/articles-eng/markish-dzherom-klapka-dzherom.htm.