The Problem of Life, Literature and Art

ir works among the canon of classics, exemplary works. This is also important to emphasize when a sharp line must be drawn between the author's personal life and his work. It is not by chance that Virginia Woolf made fun of the biographical method in the study of the literary work introduced by Sainte Beuve.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1931, R. Campbell wrote an ironic poem with the title "Georgiad" ("Georgians") to ridicule the representatives of Bloomsbury[iii], known as Georgians (authors from the era of King George), identifying them with the East, the barbarian, the impure. Sharper and more uncompromising than him is W. Lewis, defining in his critical articles the works of V. Woolf as talentless copies of M. Proust's novels, "Odyssey" by J. Joyce et al. He is sarcastic and judgmental about the brief moments of infatuation between women in “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To The Lighthouse”[iv], etc. and criticizes V. Woolf for, imitating Proust, writing novels steeped in the mental illness from which he suffers; that he upholds Samuel Coleridge's view that creators and discoverers are spiritually androgynous; compared the members of Bloomsbury to descendants of the lively inhabitants of Sodom, called them anti-Christians, and other insulting epithets; opposed the role of women in science, art, and literature, until then perceived as male activities. He claims that V. Woolf criticizes authors from whom he copies ineptly and whom he envies. His comments have a devastating effect on V. Woolf, who is trying hard to overcome her bipolar disorder, as a result of the death of her parents, her brother and sister, from the war and the disillusionment of the lack of spiritual values, the depersonalization, the killing of the human in the age of modernism[v]. This is another reason to compare the works of the two authors.

     V. Woolf builds "To the Lighthouse" with the means of impressionism, like a stream-of-consciousness puzzle. As a creator, critic and wordsmith (typesetter), the author believes that not only words and expressions are important, but also the way in which they are placed in the text, as if they were living beings and possessed "magical properties"[vi]. She carefully selects and models them in thoughts, in sentences, in a stream of consciousness. This play with the word makes it possible to hi