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Jack London

LAW OF LIFE

Old Koskush listened eagerly. His vision had long faded, but his hearing was still sharp, catching the slightest sound, and the consciousness flickering under his dried forehead was indifferent to the future. Ah, that is the shrill voice of Sit-Kum-To-Ha; she beats the dogs with a cry, putting a harness on them. Sit-Kum-To-Ha is the daughter of his daughter, but she is too busy to waste time on the decrepit grandfather, sitting alone in the snow, forgotten and helpless by everyone. It's time to get out of the parking lot. There is a long way ahead, and the short day does not want to delay. Life is calling her, calling the work that life requires, not death. And now he is so close to death.

The thought terrified the old man for a moment, and he stretched out his hand, feeling with trembling fingers for a small pile of brushwood beside him. Convinced that the brushwood was there, he again hid his hand under the worn-out fur and again began to listen.

The dry crackle of the half-frozen buckskin told him that the chief's lodge had already been taken away and that he was now being crushed into a handy bale. The leader was his son, he was tall and strong, the head of the tribe and a mighty hunter. Here is his voice, urging the slow women who are packing their belongings. Old Koskush strained his ears. This is the last time he hears that voice. Complicated wigwam Jiohou and wigwam Tusken! Seven, eight, ten... Only the wigwam of the shaman remained, putting his wigwam on the sled. The child whimpered; the woman began to comfort him, humming something in a low, guttural voice. This is little Ku-Ti, thought the old man, a capricious child and in poor health. Maybe he will die soon, and then they will burn a hole in the frozen ground of the tundra and throw stones on top to protect against wolverines. And yet, doesn't it matter? At best, he will live a few more years and will walk more often with an empty stomach than with a full one. And in the end, death will still wait for him - forever hungry and the hungriest of all.

What is there? Ah, it's the men tying up the sledges and tightening the straps tight. He listened--he who would soon hear nothing. Whistling blows of the whip rained down on the dogs. Hear, howl! How they hate the hard way! Leave! Sledge after sledge slowly slides into silence. Gone. They have disappeared from his life, and he alone will meet the last hard hour. No, the snow crunched under the moccasins. A man was standing nearby; A hand rested quietly on his head. How good his son is! He remembered the other old men, their sons leaving with the tribe. His son is not like that. The old man was carried away by his thoughts into the past, but the voice of the young man brought him back to reality.

You feel good? - asked the son.

And the old man replied:

Yes, I'm fine.

Near you there is brushwood, - continued the young one, - the fire burns brightly. The morning is grey, the frost subsides. It will snow soon. Here he goes.

Yes, he's on his way.

People are in a hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies tightened with hunger. The way is long and they go fast. I'm leaving. You feel good?

I feel good. I'm like an autumn leaf that barely hangs on a branch. The first breath of wind - and I will fall. My voice became like that of an old woman. My eyes no longer show the way to my feet, and my legs are heavy and I am tired. Everything is fine.

Satisfied Koskush bowed his head and sat like that until the mournful crunch of the snow died away in the distance; now he knew that his son no longer heard his call. And then his hand hurriedly reached out for brushwood. Only this bundle separated him from the gaping eternity before him. A handful of dry branches was the measure of his life. One by one, the branches will support the fire, and in the same way, step by step, death will crawl towards it. When the last branch gives up its warmth, the frost will set to work. First, the legs will give up, then the arms, and finally the body will numb. His head will fall on his knees, and he will calm down. It's easy. Everyone is destined to die.

Koskush did not complain. Such is life, and it is fair. He was born and lived close to the earth, and her law is not new to her. This is the law of all living beings. Nature is not kind to individual living beings. Her attention is directed to species, races. The primitive mind of old Koskush was not capable of great generalizations, but he learned this firmly. He saw examples of this everywhere in his life. The tree is filled with juices, green buds bloom, a yellow leaf falls - and the circle is completed. But nature sets a task for every living being. If it fails, it will die. Execute - still die. Nature is indifferent: there are many who are submissive to her, but eternity is destined not for the submissive, but for obedience. The Koskusha tribe is very old. The old people he remembered from when he was a boy remembered the old people before him. Consequently, the tribe lives, it personifies the obedience of all its ancestors, the very graves of which have long been forgotten. The dead don't count; they are only units. They left like clouds from the sky. And he will leave too. Nature is indifferent. She set life one task, gave one law. The task of life is the continuation of the family, its law is death. The girl is a creature that is pleasant to look at. She is strong, she has a high chest, an elastic gait, sparkling eyes. But the task of this girl is still ahead. The sparkle in her eyes flares up, her gait becomes faster, she is now bold with the young men, now timid and infects them with her anxiety. And she is getting prettier day by day; and finally some hunter takes her into his dwelling to work and cook for him and become the mother of his children. But with the birth of her first child, beauty begins to leave the woman, her gait becomes heavy and slow, her eyes grow dim and fade, and only small children happily press against the wrinkled cheek of an old woman sitting by the fire. Her task is done. And at the first threat of famine, or at the first long march, they would leave her, as they had left him, on the snow, next to a small armful of brushwood. This is the law of life.

Koskush carefully put a dry branch into the fire and returned to his thoughts. It happens everywhere and in everything. Mosquitoes disappear at the first frost. The little squirrel crawls away to die in the thicket. Over the years, the hare becomes heavier and cannot gallop away from the enemy with the same speed. Even the bear becomes blind in old age, becomes clumsy, and in the end a pack of shrill dogs overcomes him. Koskush recalled how he himself had abandoned his father in the upper Klondike - it was that winter when the missionary came to them with his prayer books and a box of medicines. More than once Koskush licked his lips at the memory of this box, but now there was no more saliva in his mouth. In particular, he remembered the "painkiller". But the missionary was a burden to the tribe, he did not bring game, but he himself ate a lot, and the hunters grumbled at him. He finally caught a cold in the river near Mayo, and then the dogs scattered stones and fought over his bones.

Koskush again put some wood on the fire and plunged even deeper into thoughts of the past. During the Great Famine, the old people huddled up to the fire and dropped from their lips the vague legends of antiquity about how the Yukon raced for three winters, free of ice, and then stood frozen for three summers. During this famine Koskush lost his mother. In the summer there was no salmon run, and the tribe was looking forward to winter and deer. Winter came, but the deer did not come with it. This has never happened even in the memory of the old people. The deer did not come, and it was the seventh famine year. Hares did not breed, and only skin and bones remained of the dogs. And children wept and died in the long winter darkness, women and old men died, and out of every ten people, only one survived until spring and the return of the sun. Yes, that was hunger!

But he also saw times of abundance, when there was so much meat that it spoiled, and fat dogs became completely lazy - times when men looked at the fleeing game and did not kill it, and women were prolific, and boys and girls fumbled and crawled in wigwams . The men then became arrogant and hardly remembered the previous quarrels. They crossed the mountains to the south to exterminate the Pelli tribe, and to the west to admire the extinguished fires of the Tanana tribe. The old man remembered that as a boy he had seen, in the year of abundance, how wolves killed an elk. Zing-Ha then lay with them in the snow, Zing-Ha, who later became a skilled hunter and ended up falling into a hole in the Yukon. He managed to get out of it only halfway - so they found him a month later frozen to the ice.

So here is the moose. He and Zing-Ha went out to play hunting that day, imitating their fathers. On the frozen river, they came across a fresh track of an elk and the tracks of wolves chasing him.

Old, - said Zing-Ha, who knew how to make out the tracks better. - Old. Lost from the herd. The wolves cut him off from his brothers and now they won't let him out.

So it was. Such is the custom of the wolf. Day and night, without rest, they will follow him with a growl at his heels, snapping their teeth at his very muzzle and will not leave him to the end. Both boys' blood boiled. The end of the hunt is worth a look.

Burning with impatience, they walked farther and farther, and even he, Koskush, who did not have sharp eyesight and tracker skills, could go forward with his eyes closed - the trail was so clear. It was quite fresh, and they read at every step the gloomy tragedy of the chase that had just been written. This is where the moose stopped. In all directions, at a distance of three human heights, the snow was trampled and blown up. In the middle are deep imprints of the elk's spread hooves, and around are lighter traces of wolves. Some, while their brethren rushed at the victim, apparently rested, lying on the snow. The imprints of their torsos were so clear, as if it had happened just a minute ago. One wolf fell under the feet of a distraught victim and was trampled to death. A pile of bones, cleanly gnawed, confirmed this.

They slowed down their skis again. Here, too, there was a desperate struggle. Twice the elk was knocked over to the ground, as the snow testified, and twice he threw off his adversaries and rose again to his feet. He had fulfilled his task long ago, but life was dear to him. Zing-Ha said, "It has never happened that an elk that has been knocked over has risen to its feet again." But this one got up.

When they later told the shaman about this, he considered it a miracle and some kind of omen.

Finally, they came to the place where the elk wanted to climb ashore and hide in the forest. But the enemies attacked him from behind, and he reared up and fell over backwards, crushing two of them. They were left lying in the snow, untouched by their brethren, for the chase was drawing to a close. Two more battlefields flashed by, one after the other. Now the trail was reddened with blood, and the smooth step of the large beast became uneven and stumbling. And now they heard the first sounds of the battle - not a loud chorus of hunting, but a short, abrupt bark, which spoke of the proximity of the wolf's teeth to the sides of the elk. Keeping against the wind, Zing-Ha crawled on his stomach through the snow, and behind him crawled Koskush - the one who was to become the leader of his tribe over the years. They took aside the branches of a young spruce and looked out from behind them. And they saw the very end of the battle.

This spectacle, like all the impressions of youth, was still fresh in Koskush's memory, and the end of the chase appeared before his dimmed eyes as brightly as in those distant times. Koskush marveled at this, for in the days that followed, as chief of men and head of the council, he did many great deeds—not to mention the strange white man whom he stabbed in hand-to-hand combat—and his name became a curse in the mouths of the Pelli people. .

For a long time Koskush thought about the days of his youth, and finally the fire began to die out, and the frost intensified. This time, he threw two branches into the fire at once, and with those that remained, he accurately measured his power over death. If Sit-Kum-To-Ha had thought of her grandfather and gathered a larger armful, the hours of his life would have been extended. Is it so difficult? But Sit-Kum-To-Ha had always been carefree, and since the Beaver, the son of Zing-Ha, first glanced at her, she completely ceased to honor her ancestors. And yet, doesn't it matter? Did he act differently in the days of his frisky youth?

Koskusz listened to the silence for a minute. Perhaps his son's heart will be softened and he will return with the dogs and take his old father, along with the whole tribe, to where there are many deer with fat sides from fat.

Koskush strained his ears, his mind paused for a moment in its intense work. No sound - silence. In the midst of complete silence, only his breathing is heard. What loneliness! Chu! What is this? A shiver went through his body. A familiar, drawn-out howl cut through the silence. He resounded somewhere close. And before the sightless eyes of Koskush a vision appeared: an elk, an old male, with tormented, bloody sides and a tousled mane, bends down large branched horns and beats them off with the last of his strength. He saw flashing gray bodies, burning eyes, fangs, saliva dripping from tongues. And he saw how the circle was inexorably shrinking closer and closer, little by little merging into a black spot in the middle of the trampled snow.

A cold muzzle poked into his cheek, and from this touch his thoughts were transferred to the present. He reached out to the fire and pulled out a firebrand. Yielding to a hereditary fear of man, the beast retreated with a drawn-out howl addressed to its brethren. And they immediately answered him, and the wolf mouths splashing with saliva closed around the fire in a ring. The old man listened, then waved his firebrand and the snorting immediately turned into a growl; the animals did not want to retreat. Here one leaned forward with his chest, pulling his hind legs behind his body, then the second, the third; but not one stepped back. Why cling to life? - Koskush asked himself and dropped the flaming brand on the snow. She hissed and froze. The wolves growled in alarm, but did not move. Again Koskush saw the last battle of the old elk and lowered his head heavily on his knees. In the end, does it matter? Isn't that the law of life?

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"Life is a strange thing. I thought a lot, thought about it for a long time, but every day it seems to me more and more incomprehensible. Why do we have such a thirst for life? After all, life is a game from which a person never comes out victorious. To live is it means to work hard and suffer until old age creeps up on us, and then we drop our hands on the cold ashes of the cooled fires.

A child is born in pain, an old man breathes his last breath in pain, and all our days are full of sorrow and worries. And yet a person goes into the open arms of death reluctantly, stumbling, falling, looking back, fighting to the last. But death is good. Only life causes suffering. But we love life and hate death. It is very strange!"

Jack London (born January 12, 1876, died November 22, 1916) is best known for his books The Fierce Beast, The White Fang, The Sea Wolf, stories such as The White Silence.

He was one of America's most famous writers and a national hero. Having changed a myriad of professions, Jack London has never avoided adventure. Being married, he entered into a relationship with the writer Anna Stransky, which was the reason for his divorce from his wife. London has always maintained that he does not believe in the existence of love, but the following letter clearly shows the symptoms of love sickness. He was one of the most influential figures of his time, knew what it meant to be a public person and used the media, creating an image of a poor man who made his way to the very top. Agriculture was his real passion. And on his ranch, he was close to the idea of ​​creating a new type of farming when he died at the age of 40 from kidney disease. After him, about 50 collections of stories and articles remained, many of which have been translated into other languages ​​and are still in demand among readers.

"Dear Ann!

I said that all people can be divided into types? If I said, then let me clarify - not all. You're slipping away, I can't attribute you to any species, I can't figure you out. I can boast that out of 10 people, I can predict the behavior of nine. Judging by words and actions, I can guess the heart rate of nine out of ten people. But the tenth is a mystery to me, I am in despair because it is higher than me. You are the tenth.

Has it ever happened that two silent souls, so dissimilar, so suited each other? Of course, we often feel the same way, but even when we feel something differently, we still understand each other, even though we do not have a common language. We don't need words spoken aloud. We are too incomprehensible and mysterious for this. The Lord must be laughing, seeing our silent action.

The only glimmer of common sense in all of this is that we both have a frenzied temperament, huge enough that we could be understood. True, we often understand each other, but with elusive glimpses, vague sensations, as if ghosts, while we doubt, haunt us with their perception of the truth. And yet I dare not believe that you are the tenth person whose behavior I cannot predict.

Am I hard to understand now? I don't know, maybe it is. I can't find a common language.

Huge temperament - that's what allows us to be together. For a second, eternity itself flared up in our hearts and we were drawn to each other, despite the fact that we are so different.

Do I smile when you get excited? That smile that can be forgiven - no, it's an envious smile. For 25 years I lived in a depressed state. I have learned not to admire. This is a lesson that cannot be forgotten. I'm starting to forget, but that's not enough. At best, I hope that before I die, I will forget everything, or almost everything. I can already rejoice, I am learning this little by little, I rejoice in the little things, but I cannot rejoice at what is in me, my innermost thoughts, I cannot, I cannot. Am I unclear? Do you hear my voice? I'm afraid not. There are many hypocrites in the world. I am the most successful of them."

Jack.

Quotes from Jack London's "Daughter of the Northern Lights"
from the collection of stories "God of his fathers", 1901

Men - each individually and all together - are arranged in such a way that they often reach the grave, remaining in blissful ignorance of the full depth of deceit inherent in the other half of the human race.

Where love comes from and where it goes, no one knows. So the sages of antiquity asserted, and it is difficult to disagree with them: there is nothing more mysterious under the moon.

Life is a strange thing. I thought a lot, thought about it for a long time, but every day it seems to me more and more incomprehensible. Why do we have such a lust for life? After all, life is a game from which a person never comes out a winner. To live means to work hard and suffer until old age creeps up on us, and then we drop our hands on the cold ashes of the cooled fires. Life is hard. A child is born in pain, an old man breathes his last breath in pain, and all our days are full of sorrow and worries. And yet man goes into the open arms of death reluctantly, stumbling, falling; looking back, fighting to the last. But death is good. Only life causes suffering. But we love life and hate death. It is very strange!

We must live every day as if it were the last moment. We do not have a rehearsal - we have a life! We don't start it from Monday - we live today!

Being friends does not mean knowing someone for a very long time. It means to accept into your life someone who will never disappear from it.

Life, like a washing machine, sometimes turns us inside out, throws us from side to side, twists us into a ram's horn and squeezes all the juice out of us. But after that we become cleaner and better. And often, stronger!

What a strange creature man is. His whole life is a continuous miracle, but he does not believe in miracles.

War is always stupid, because it brings only death and suffering. But instead of learning from history, the man seems to take pleasure in killing his fellow man.

We are all in a hurry
Achieve everything, a lot and at once
But only sing the song of life,
For life, failed ... never

There is a genius in all of us. And every day it gets stronger...

Thank God more often!
Don't you forget about
How much He has done for us in life.
Each of us is blessed!

After all, many did not even dream
Work, family, friends...
We are only left with you
Thank Him, love!

There are so many trials in life...
which they could not pass,
But before Him is the whole universe
And He keeps our ways.

And for Him, believe me, it is possible -
Heal all wounds of the heart
Forgiveness with Him and love is not difficult, -
Walk in victory with faith.

Margaret Hanen could not be overlooked under any circumstances, but she especially struck me when I saw her for the first time: having shouldered a bag of grain weighing a good hundredweight, she walked with unsteady but determined steps from the cart to the barn and only stopped for a minute take a break at the steep ladder, along which it was necessary to climb to the bins. There were four steps, and Margaret climbed them step by step, slowly but surely and with such stubborn persistence that it never occurred to me to fear that her strength would fail her and this bag would fall from her shoulders, under the weight of which almost her thin and decrepit body bent in half. It was immediately evident that this woman was very old, and that is why I lingered at the cart, watching her.

Six times she walked from the cart to the barn, dragging full sacks on her back, and after saying hello, she paid no more attention to me. When the cart was empty, she reached into her pocket for matches and lit a short clay pipe, crushing the burning tobacco with her hardened and apparently numb thumb. I looked at her hands, sinewy, swollen in the joints, with broken nails, disfigured by black work, covered with calluses, scars, and in some places with fresh and healing scratches - such hands are usually found in men engaged in heavy physical labor. Strongly swollen veins spoke eloquently of age, of years of overwork. Looking at them, it was hard to believe that these were the hands of a woman who was once considered the first beauty of McGill Island. However, I learned this later.

And on that day, neither this woman nor her story was completely unknown to me.

She wore heavy men's shoes of rough, warped leather, worn on her bare feet, and I noticed even earlier that these iron-hard shoes, in which her bare feet dangled freely, rubbed her ankles when walking. Flat-chested, thin, she was dressed in a rough man's shirt and a tattered skirt of once-red flannel. But I was most interested in her face, weather-beaten, wrinkled, framed by unkempt tufts of gray hair, and I could no longer tear myself away from it. Neither the disheveled hair nor the network of wrinkles could hide the beauty of her wonderful high forehead, the lines of which were flawless. The sunken cheeks and pointed nose did little to match the fire that smoldered in the depths of her bright blue eyes. Surrounded by a network of small wrinkles that for some reason did not age them, Margaret's eyes were clear, like those of a young girl - clear, wide open and vigilant, and their direct, unblinking, fixed gaze caused some confusion in me. A curious feature of this face was the distance between the eyes. In few people this distance reaches the length of the eye, and in Margaret Hanen it was no less than one and a half lengths. But her face was so symmetrical that this feature did not spoil it in the least, and a not very attentive observer, perhaps, would not even notice it. The toothless mouth, which had lost its sharpness of lines, with the downturned corners of the dry parchment lips, did not yet reveal that flaccidity of the muscles, which is the usual sign of old age. A mummy could have had such lips if it were not for their inherent expression of inexorable stubbornness. They did not seem lifeless at all - on the contrary, a great spiritual strength was felt in their decisive fold. In the expression of her lips and eyes lay the key to the confidence with which this woman, never once stumbling and without losing her balance, dragged heavy bags up the steep stairs and poured grain into the chest.

You are an old woman, and you have taken up such a job! I decided to say.

She looked at me with her strange fixed gaze, thought, and spoke with her characteristic slowness, as if she knew that before her was eternity and there was nothing to hurry. Again, I was struck by her immense self-confidence. Undoubtedly, there was a strong feeling of eternity in her, and hence this firm step and calmness with which she dragged heavy bags up the stairs - in a word, hence her self-confidence. In her spiritual life, she probably didn't fear slipping or losing her balance in the same way. She gave me a strange feeling. I met a being who in everything, except for the most elementary points of contact, turned out to be beyond my human understanding. And the closer I got to know Margaret Hanen over the next few weeks, the more I felt this incomprehensible aloofness of her. Margaret seemed to be a visitor from some other planet, and neither she nor her fellow villagers could help me in any way to understand what kind of spiritual experiences, what intensity of feelings or philosophical outlook moved her in the past and present.

I'll be seventy-two two weeks after Good Friday,” she said, responding to my remark.

Well, you see, I say that you are too old for this kind of work. This is a job for a man, and a strong man at that, I insisted.

She thought again, as if contemplating eternity - and this made such a strange impression that I would not be at all surprised if, falling asleep and waking up a century later, I saw that she was only just about to answer me.

Someone has to do the work, but I don't like bowing to people.

Don't you have any relatives or children?

I have a lot of them, but they do not help me. She took the pipe out of her mouth for a moment and added, pointing at the house with a nod of her head:

I live alone.

I looked at the capacious thatched house, at the large barn, at the fields that spread wide around and, obviously, belonged to the owner of this farm.

How do you handle such a large area alone?

Yes, the area is big. Seventy acres. Both my old man and my son had enough to do, and even a worker lived with us, and a maid for housework, and during the cleaning I had to hire day laborers.

She climbed onto the cart and, taking the reins in her hands, looked inquisitively at me with her lively and intelligent eyes.

You must be from across the sea - from America, that is?

Yes, I'm American.

In America, probably, you will not meet many people from our McGill Island?

I don't remember ever meeting one in the States. She nodded.

Yes, we have such people - homebodies. True, it cannot be said that they did not travel the world, but in the end everyone returns home - everyone who did not die at sea and did not die in a foreign land from a fever or other misfortunes.

Were your sons also on the voyage and returned home? I asked.

Yes, everyone except Samuel: Samuel drowned. I could have sworn that when she mentioned that name, a strange light lit up in her eyes. And, as if under the influence of a telepathic connection that suddenly arose between us, I guessed in her great sadness, inescapable longing. It seemed to me that here it is - the key to the secrets of this soul, the guiding thread, which, if you stubbornly hold on to it, will lead to an explanation of everything incomprehensible. I felt that a point of contact had been found, and that at that moment I looked into Margaret's soul. I already had a second question on my tongue, but she smacked her lips, urging the horse, shouted to me: “Bless you, sir!” - and left.

The inhabitants of McGill Island are a simple, unsophisticated people. I don't think you'll find such hard-working, sedate and thrifty people all over the world. If you meet them in a foreign land (and outside your homeland you can only meet them at sea, for every native of McGill is a cross between a sailor and a farmer), you will not mistake them for Irish. They consider themselves Irish, speak proudly of Northern Ireland and mock their fellow Scots. Meanwhile, they are undoubtedly Scots - it is true, they have long been resettled here, but still real Scots, who have retained a thousand characteristic features, not to mention the peculiarities of speech and soft pronunciation, which only thanks to the purely Scottish isolation and isolation within their clan could be preserved until so far.

Only a narrow gulf of sea some half a mile wide separates McGill Island from the mainland of Ireland. But, having crossed this strip of water, you find yourself in a completely different country. There is already a strong sense of Scotland here. To begin with, at least with the fact that all the inhabitants of the island are Presbyterians. Then, if I tell you that there is not a single inn on the whole island, and that there are seven thousand people living here, this will give you some idea of ​​\u200b\u200btheir abstinence. The inhabitants of McGill are devoted to old customs, public opinion here is the law, the priests have great influence. Nowadays, there are few places where parents are so revered and obeyed. Young people walk only until ten o'clock in the evening, and not a single girl will go anywhere with her boyfriend without the knowledge and consent of her parents.

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London Jack
Jack London (article)

JACK LONDON

Ten years ago, at the berths of the American city of Oakland, separated by a small strait from San Francisco, the Soviet tanker "Donbass" moored. Jack London, one of the greatest American writers, was born and lived in these places, and a group of Soviet sailors, among whom there were many of his admirers, decided to take the opportunity and wander around London places. Having disembarked, the sailors began to ask port workers and employees what sights associated with the memory of Jack London can be seen in Auckland.

“We,” one of them recalls, “answered the tall American Marley, a ship supply agent:

- There is nothing interesting ... Whiskey, beer is good. No? What are you interested in? Museums, attractions? .. However, there is ... a pub where Lzhek London drank. Oh, he knew a lot about it! You know that he was only in such a state and could drive with a pen!

He walked away without adding anything to what he had said. A riveter stood nearby ... He heard Marley's explanations and quickly moved closer to us:

- This is the opinion of the boss ... Jack London came out of the workers. For the boss, Jack London and all the workers are drunkards. Jack was not ashamed to write about physical labor and is not suitable for them - for those who are at the top! Oh, they need writers who write about sighs and naked women... or something like that. But there is a pub here, and he used to go there all the time. But she served him for another - he worked there! The owner of the pub will tell you the same thing, and he is a personal friend of Jack London. If you want, I'll take you there as soon as I finish my work."

This episode quite eloquently speaks not only about the attitude of representatives of various social strata of modern America towards Jack London, but also is a kind of assessment of the democratic orientation of the work of one of the largest American writers.

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco, the son of a bankrupt farmer. From early childhood, the future writer learned about hopeless need, suffering and deprivation, from childhood he experienced all the bleakness of the existence of a worker in a country dominated by the yellow devil - capital. As a little boy he sold newspapers, as a fourteen-year-old teenager he worked in a cannery, as a sailor sailed to the coast of Japan, was a laborer in a jute factory, and finally ended up in the army of the unemployed.

Wandering the roads of America in search of a job, close acquaintance with the life of the lower classes enriched the future writer with a mass of impressions, forced him to take a critical look at the contemporary capitalist world, its economic foundations, its politics, its morality.

Eighteen-year-old boy, continuing to work hard to earn a living, Jack London enters first in high school, and then, having prepared independently, to the university. He reads a lot, studies fiction, natural sciences, history, philosophy. By the same time, London showed interest in socialist literature and, mainly, in the works of Karl Marx. In them, London finds a justification for his thoughts, his views on life. He joins the labor movement, and later, in 1901, becomes a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America.

At the university, Jack London studied for only six months. The difficult financial situation of the family makes him leave his studies and go to work in the laundry.

In 1896, rich gold deposits were found in Alaska along the Klondike River and its tributaries. The beginning of the "gold fever" carries thousands of people to the North. He goes to Alaska and London, although the desire to get rich attracts him much less than the opportunity to see an unknown, unexplored land, to get acquainted with the life and life of the Indian tribes inhabiting it, with the life of gold miners, to see the titanic struggle of man with nature.

In Alaska, Jack London stayed for about a year - he fell ill with scurvy and was forced to return to San Francisco. Of course, he did not find gold, but here, in the North, enriched by life experience and a lot of impressions, London "found himself as a writer."

The beginning of Jack London's literary activity coincides with the time when US capitalism enters its last, imperialist stage. There is an increased concentration and centralization of capital in the country. The financial oligarchy penetrates with its tentacles into all pores of the life of the country. The growth of industry and the progress of technology lead to intensified exploitation of the workers, to mass unemployment, to the misery and suffering of the masses of the people, to the intensification of the class struggle.

At the end of the 19th century, the United States of America embarked on the path of imperialist policy. They begin to seize colonies, markets, sources of raw materials, to enslave weak and small peoples. The ideologists of American imperialism are developing a "theory" about the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race over other peoples, trying to "theoretically" substantiate the necessity of the US struggle for world domination.

The era of imperialism deepens the crisis of bourgeois culture. In the hands of the monopolists, literature becomes an instrument for deceiving and fooling the masses. Diligently bypassing acute social problems, without touching upon the existence of deep social contradictions, bourgeois writers speak of social harmony, of the stability and immutability of the social order established in the capitalist countries. A self-satisfied, prosperous businessman becomes a typical hero of American literature. The imperialist policy pursued by the United States brings to the pages of bourgeois American literature yet another figure - the figure of the Yankee conqueror, a representative of the "master race", a "hero" who sings a panegyric of war, robbery and violence. And, finally, the defense and glorification of imperialism lead some writers into the world of mysticism and pessimism.

But despite the fact that the conditions for literary activity for any really honest writer were and continue to be extremely difficult in modern America, the voices of writers who have taken the path of realism are louder and louder in American literature.

Mark Twain criticizes the hypocrisy and hypocrisy of bourgeois society; truthfully, without embellishment, Stephen Crane draws the life of a simple person, Frank Norris turns to the socially accusatory novel. In close connection with the growth of the class struggle, with the development of the revolutionary working-class movement in the United States of America, the formation and development of London as an artist takes place.

Jack London was the first writer in American literature, from the pages of whose works the spirit of the class struggle was breathed, the voice of the revolutionary protest of the working masses sounded.

During his relatively short life in literature (16 years), Jack London wrote a large number of novels ("Daughter of the Snows", "Sea Wolf", "Iron Heel", "Martin Eden", "Red Sun", etc.), 152 stories, included in the collections "Son of the Wolf", "God of His Fathers", "Love of Life", "South American Stories" and others, several plays, a number of essays and journalistic articles.

Already in the early, so-called "northern stories", Jack London sang of a simple man, brave and noble, faithful in love and disinterested in friendship, a man who loves freedom and hates the corrupt bourgeois world. London called a real person someone who loves work and who is ready to overcome any difficulties and obstacles encountered on his way.

But not only Sitka Charlie and Passuk, Ruth, Kid or Mason - people worthy of respect, saw London in the land of White Silence. He brought to the reader's judgment a man-owner, obsessed with a greed for profit and worshiping only one thing - gold, and showed his bestial face in all his unsightly nakedness (the stories "Golden Canyon", "Finis", etc.).

Despite the fact that the heroes of Jack London's "Northern stories" are romantic lone rebels fighting for their happiness, for their freedom, for their place in life, and not for changing the existing system as a whole, the writer already here appears as a passionate, implacable critic of the capitalist world.

In 1902, Jack London visited England, where he decided to carefully get acquainted with the life of the working quarters of the capital of the British Kingdom. The writer saw pictures of the life of English working people, stunning in their tragedy, dragging out a miserable, beggarly existence. “In the eastern quarters of London,” he wrote, “two million workers live and die ... The ruling classes are increasingly isolating the workers, driving them into places where people live what is called “head to head” ... The management system, so monstrous, so criminally worthless, must inevitably be swept away. This is not only a wasteful and mediocre system. Every emaciated, bloodless poor person, every blind man, every juvenile delinquent who is in prison, every person whose empty stomach is cramping from hunger pangs, - suffers because the wealth of the country is plundered by its rulers.

The result of Jack London's trip to England was a book of essays by the writer "People of the Abyss" - a work that testifies to the decisive transition of its author to the position of literature of critical realism. From the pages of this book, the angry voice of the writer denounced the social system based on oppression and exploitation, a voice in defense of the poor and oppressed, a voice that wants to "awaken the dormant conscience of people and draw them into the struggle for humanity" sounded in full force.

In exposing bourgeois "civilization" in his essays, Jack London correctly pointed out who was to blame for such a terribly plight of the masses. The writer passionately argues that this cannot continue, that the existing system must be changed. But Jack London failed to see in the working class the force that would become the gravedigger of capitalism.

Social lawlessness, the cruelest exploitation of the working masses in the United States of America, manifested in even more cruel forms, was shown by London in the essay "Revolution" and the stories "Apostate", "Kill a Man", etc. London draws tragic pictures of slave labor in capitalist enterprises, talks about inhuman suffering, about the need and lack of rights of the American worker. “In the United States,” writes Jack London, “there are 15 million people living in complete poverty ... 15 million people do not have the opportunity to maintain a minimum of their vitality ... are doomed to death, to painful dying, physical and spiritual ... In every big city there are quarters of the poor, ghettos of the poor, where hundreds of thousands and millions of people live in terrible conditions, live like animals. diseases ..., did not work as long and hard as they did."

Capitalism cripples a person physically, cripples him spiritually as well. And in the novel "Martin Eden", one of the best works of the realistic trend in American literature, Jack London clearly showed how hostile bourgeois "civilization" is to genuine culture, how it cripples and corrupts people. In the world of capitalism there is no place for a true artist. "Bourgeois culture," says the hero of the novel, Martin Eden, a talented writer from the people, "cannot stand realism. The bourgeoisie is cowardly. She is afraid of life."

Jack London angrily denounces the racial discrimination that flourishes in the United States, speaks with contempt of the American "justice machine" (the story "Grab" and others). In his "southern" stories devoted to California and the Pacific Ocean ("Kulau the leper", "Mauki", etc.), the writer exposes the most cruel colonial policy of the imperialists, aimed at the barbaric extermination of the natives. With merciless sarcasm, Jack London draws portraits of the colonialists, people who imagine themselves to be the bearers of civilization and immediately brutally torture their slaves.

Jack London enthusiastically welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907. The writer travels around the country, speaks to a working audience with reports on the first revolution in Russia, on its enormous significance for the future fate of the revolutionary movement throughout the world. During these years, under the influence of the Russian revolution, the growth of the revolutionary movement in the United States and the work of M. Gorky, Jack London created his best works, among which the social novel "Iron Heel" occupies an outstanding place. Here the writer made an attempt to portray the future socialist revolution in the United States and other countries of the world. Jack London subjects bourgeois politics, bourgeois statehood, bourgeois morality to annihilating criticism. He takes off the mask from the notorious American "democratic freedoms", writes about the violence of the imperialists, covered up by loud, but through and through false and hypocritical phrases about the constitution, declarations, charters, rights, etc. The great realist artist Jack London already then saw what was emerging in American foreign policy the desire to enslave peoples, to establish world domination.

The world of impudent tyranny must be countered by the powerful force of the organized revolutionary proletariat, the author asserts in his novel, and only then will the workers be able to get rid of slave chains. "The army of twenty-five million revolutionaries is such a formidable force that the rulers and ruling classes have much to think about." “The day will come,” says the hero of the novel, the revolutionary Ernest Everhard, “and we will take away your power, your mansions and gilded luxury, and you will have to bend your back in the same way to earn a piece of bread, just as a peasant in the field or a scrawny, hungry one oppresses her. clerk in your cities. Here are our hands! These are strong hands!"

However, despite its great value, the novel "The Iron Heel" is not free from major shortcomings, for the writer showed the revolution of the future in an anarcho-individualist plan. Jack London's fascination with the reactionary H. Spencer's philosophy, which reduced all social life to a biological struggle for existence, also had an effect here. In the future, this passion led the writer to the chanting of a strong single person (the novel "Red Sun", etc.).

Tragic consequences for Jack London were the general decline of the labor movement, which came after the defeat of the revolution in Russia, and the influence of bourgeois ideology, which he was unable to resist. Jack London moves away from the labor movement and the ideas of socialism. His work is on the decline. Having come to terms with capitalist reality, which was reflected in such of his last works as "Moon Valley", "Little Mistress of the Big House", etc., having broken ties with the people, the writer is going through a painful spiritual crisis.

Jack London died in 1916 at the age of 40.

There is no doubt, however, that despite the duality of his worldview, despite his reconciliation with bourgeois reality, Jack London was and remains the greatest American writer. All the best in his creative heritage has a profoundly modern significance and is dear to progressive mankind, which is waging a struggle against imperialist reaction and the instigators of a new world war.