INTRODUCTION
"Robinson Crusoe" – an English novel of the Enlightenment, is one of the most widely read works of world literature. It is popular with both children and adults. Its entertaining quality lies in the adventurous, poetized "nature" of the novel's main plot line.
Also, this novel has interested many researchers and critics, who highly appreciate the writer's contribution to the development of national traditions of the genre and all Western European fiction. Daniel Defoe was one of those authors-enlighteners who laid the foundations of many types, genre varieties and forms of the novel of the XIX-XX centuries.
Researchers who have studied the work of the English writer Daniel Defoe, note the incomparable realism of his works, namely realism in the description of various small details and details.
"Robinson Crusoe on his island-alone, deprived of the help of his own kind and all kinds of tools, providing himself, however, with food and self-preservation and even achieving some well-being-this is a subject... that can be made entertaining in a thousand ways...", wrote the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau in the pedagogical treatise "Emile, or on education".
Many critics believed that the main problem of the novel is a vivid example of a "natural man" who won a single battle with nature.
CHAPTER 1. DANIEL DEFOE-ENGLISH WRITER AND PUBLICIST
Daniel Defoe (1660 – 24 April 1731) was an English writer and essayist, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe.
Defoe is considered one of the first founders of the "novel" genre. Defoe is a prolific and diverse writer, writing more than 500 books, pamphlets and magazines on various topics (politics, economics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, the supernatural, etc.). He was also the founder of economic journalism. In journalism, he promoted bourgeois sanity, defended religious tolerance and freedom of speech.
The biography of Daniel Defoe was very stormy, filled with interesting events and exciting stories.
Daniel Defoe was born in September 1660 in London. The exact date of his birth is not known, as the parish registers, where there was a record of his birth and baptism, burned down during the great Fire of London in 1666, when almost the entire city burned down.
From the age of 12 to 16, Daniel studied at school. His father wanted his son to become a priest, so he sent him to Newington Academy. But despite his father's dreams, the boy developed an aptitude for geography, foreign languages, and polemics. The desire to become a priest soon left Daniel completely.
After graduating from Newington Academy, he became a clerk for a merchant. During this work, Daniel traveled to many countries, including Spain, France, Portugal, etc., but, despite a decent income and travel, decided to leave the merchant.
Later he returned to England, and, being a Protestant, began to speak with pamphlets against the Catholic Church. This brought Defoe fame, and he began to write pamphlets, essays in verse or prose on political topics of concern to society, and also published his own newspaper, The Review. He was known as one of the most active politicians, but only the literary work of Defoe provided him with fame for several generations to come. Defoe was able to exert great influence over the king and the government, although he did not hold a specific public office.
In addition to writing, Dehaniel Defoe was engaged in trade, but in this business he did not succeed, because in the 1690s he borrowed a large sum to build a brick factory, which later went bankrupt, and Defoe found himself in debt. He was never able to pay his debts, for which he was repeatedly put in prison, where he got acquainted with the life of the London "bottom" - murderers, thieves, fraudsters, and others.
After a failed business, Defoe began working professionally as a journalist. In 1690, he began writing articles for the London newspaper "The Athenian Mercury", and from 1692 journalism became his main activity.
Daniel Defoe became the founder of criminal, economic and political journalism. Defoe began to write about what really worried society, and the press ceased to resemble school wall newspapers.
In addition, D. Defoe became the founder of the interview.
In the late 1690s, D. Defoe began to engage in political satire, he wrote pamphlets-small satirical pamphlets in which power was ridiculed.
At the time, many English aristocrats were dissatisfied with the king, William III of Orange, and sponsored the publication of the pamphlet "Foreigners", which ridiculed the foreign king who spoke little English.
CHAPTER 2. THE NOVEL " ROBINSON CRUSOE»
His first novel about the adventures of Robinson, the full title of which is "The life and amazing adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a sailor from York, who lived twenty — eight years alone on a desert island off the coast of America, near the mouth of the Orinoco River, where he was thrown by a shipwreck, during which all the crew of the ship, except him, died, with an account of his unexpected release by pirates, written by himself" - Defoe wrote at the age of 59.
The first edition of "Robinson Crusoe" was published in London on April 25, 1719 without the author's name. Defoe gave this work for a manuscript left by the hero of the story. Defoe did this out of necessity. The book was expected to make a good profit, which Defoe was certainly interested in. However, he understood that his name as a journalist who writes sharp journalistic articles and pamphlets, can damage the success of the book, rather than cause attention to it. Thus, he hid his authorship, waiting until the book gained unprecedented fame.
In Russia, "Robinson Crusoe" became known more than a hundred years after its appearance in England. This is due to the fact that the mass non-aristocratic reader in Russia appeared only in the second half of the XIX century.
CHAPTER 3. THE PROBLEM OF "NATURAL" MAN IN THE NOVEL "ROBINSON CRUSOE»
One of the main themes raised in the novel is the theme of labor and "natural man". The "natural" person, according to the author of the novel, is a worker and creator.
Daniel Defoe reflected in the novel an adequate perception of reality, conveyed all the amazing moments with high accuracy. "It is surprising that almost no one has thought about how many small jobs need to be done to grow, preserve, collect, prepare and bake an ordinary piece of bread "[1] - reflects Robinson Crusoe.
It is clear that the totality of all these "small jobs" is labor, in this case presented, first of all, as a forced necessity for survival on a desert island. But, despite the author's direct instructions that" finding himself in the most primitive conditions of life", Robinson Crusoe daily "came to despair", there is no impression of hopelessness and hopelessness in this situation. In order to somehow transform the hero's presence on the island, the author creates a whole system of artistic and visual means that elevate the process of work itself from the physical level to the spiritual.
First of all, Robinson made every effort to survive. But the author presents his necessary efforts as adventures-adventures connected with the most ordinary things: making furniture, burning pots, arranging housing, growing bread, taming goats. So, torrential rains, which did not stop for almost two weeks, force the hero to devote two or three hours every day to earthworks and expand his cave. The search for a hiding place for a new batch of goats results in the discovery of places of cannibal feasts.
In describing everyday activities, the author of "Robinson Crusoe" shows, among other things, a certain ingenuity. Work for him is not a burden, but a delaying experiment in mastering the world. There is nothing unreal about what his hero does on the island, how he tries to survive and what he does for this purpose. On the contrary, the author seeks to portray the evolution of labor skills as consistently and even emotionally as possible: "... after two months of tireless work, when I finally found clay, dug it up, brought it home and started working, I only got two large ugly clay vessels..." [2]
According to the researchers, Robinson Crusoe did not succeed at first only those things, the process of making which the author himself knew well from his own experience and, therefore, could reliably describe all the processes to the smallest detail, which indicates a broad outlook of Defoe and awareness in various fields of activity. This applies in full to the firing of clay, since at the end of the XVII century. Defoe was a co-owner of a brick factory. Robinson took almost a year of effort to "instead of clumsy rough products" from under his hands came out " neat things of the right shape."
But the main thing in the presentation of work for Daniel Dafoe is not even the result itself, but the emotional impression – the feeling of delight and satisfaction from creating your own hands, from overcoming obstacles, which the hero experiences: "But I don't think I've ever been so happy and proud of my intelligence as on the day I managed to make a pipe," [3] – says Robinson. The same feeling of delight and enjoyment of the "fruits of his labors" he experiences after the completion of the construction of the hut.
As you can see, it is ingenuity that underlies the transfer of labor features in Defoe.
Work in the novel "Robinson Crusoe" as a factor in the education and testing of the natural man.
According to the well-known philosophical concept of labor, it was labor that created the natural man, separating him from the animal world. Man differs from the animal in that they can only adapt to nature, and man adapts it to himself. The purpose of the experiment conducted by D. Defoe is to determine the moral potential of the natural person, the creative possibilities of his hands and mind, the reality of improving society.
CONCLUSION
According to Marx, the hero of Defoe became a living embodiment of the enlightenment's ideas about modern man as a "natural" person, "not historically arisen, but given by nature itself."
Defoe, on the example of the life of Robinson, proves the special value of work in the development of society and the creation of its material and spiritual base. The worship of work and creative activity, which for the first time in the history of world literature appeared in a work of fiction, became a sharp, uncompromising criticism of both the feudal past and the bourgeois present of England at the beginning of the XVIII century. It is the work and creative activity of the mind that can radically change the world. Thanks to labor on a desert island, a kind of "civilization" arises, the creator of which is a reasonable and religious person,
The purpose of the novel is to change or at least correct a person. Robinson's confession told how, in spite of everything, a person did not change himself, remained himself. Instead of the pursuit of luck, which was engaged in a young, driven to the adventurous spirit of the time, Robinson, achieved everything by work. But the work depicted majestically by Defoe, like all life on the island, is in the fate of Robinson, in fact, a transitional stage. Robinson ran away from home for a bold venture, and he returned to his native shores thirty years later as a merchant entrepreneur.
We can say that Robinson remained what he was, the son of a merchant, the brother of a mercenary officer, a sailor from York, born in the early 30s of the XVII century, in the era of the first terrible signs of the coming bourgeois revolution. And all the trials that had befallen him had not erased a single birthmark from his past.
