Famous Victorians

It is not without reason that Lytton Strachey's (1880-1932) Eminent Victorians (1918) is considered one of the greatest biographies of all time. Like a fresh wind, it burst into the literary world and opened a window on the times to come; it stirred up the Bloomsbury group (W. Woolf, E.-M. Forster, etc.) and anticipated the prose of the "lost generation". Written at the height of the First World War, Eminent Victorians sounded like a scathing critical judgment of the Victorian era. Strachey acted as a teacher, explaining how to relate to the past - rejecting prejudices and sympathies. As if with a powerful searchlight, he snatched from the darkness the unshakable pillars, shrouded in a sacred halo: here is Cardinal Henry Manning, the “holy ascetic” and genius of humility; and the “Lady with a lamp in her hands”, the bright angel of the infirmary during the Crimean War Florence Nightingale; and the great reformer of prestigious private schools Dr. Thomas Arnold; and the Christian ascetic and hero who died as a martyr, General Charles George Gordon - all of them, the idols of the Victorians, appeared for the first time to the eyes of the shocked reader not as frozen statues, but as people with their own delusions, weaknesses and vices, and therefore alive, but at the same time mysterious. "Eminent Victorians", offered to the attention of the domestic reader for the first time, are not just biographies "without embellishment", a provocative statement, a resounding "slap in the face" of the past, this is a milestone in the history of the genre, a sentence to "standard biographies" - mechanical summaries of facts and figures that filled the bookstores at the dawn of the 20th century. Before us are sincere stories boiling with passions, read in one breath. In this regard, Strachey is not only a direct heir to the great biographers of the 18th century, he is also a prophet who anticipated many genres of the 20th-21st centuries: subjective reportage, "gonzo journalism", historical series, etc. The voice of the author, "the sphinx of English modernism", who on the threshold of turning points asked a riddle, the answer to which has not yet been found, clearly sounds from the pages of the famous book. This edition is supplied with a detailed reference apparatus. In a capacious article by the remarkable researchers of English literature, B. M. Proskurnin and D. B. Vershinina, the history of the creation of this "literary monument" is revealed in detail. And in an exhaustive commentary that has no analogues in the world, historical events and realities are explained in detail, the main sources on which the author relied are identified, light is shed on his "creative workshop": literary devices, romantic inserts, the author's interpretations of the mentioned events are noted. The reader is given the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the documentary basis of artistic episodes born of the "historical imagination" and separate the "wheat from the chaff", truth from fiction, because many impressive characteristics and scenes from Strachey's work are still accepted even in serious historical works as irrefutable facts. Recommended for the widest range of readers.