ИСТИНА

The Flip Side of Progress in the "Gothic" Tales of A. Bierce In his essay "Civilization", Bierce states that America is following in the footsteps of older civilizations "with needless haste", as a result the nation is "wasting its energy". Bierce's "gothic" tales raise the question of the costs of the forced development that America experienced in the post-war period. The writer is particularly concerned about the following negative trends: 1. Messianic aspiration to the future and insufficient depth of the historical horizon hampered the Romantic view of the national past. In the eyes of the American, the "old" has not yet become "ancient", it has not acquired the authority and sublime beauty of a "relic", a national symbol. Hence the neglect of cemeteries and memorials, the aversion to old buildings and ruins that remind Bierce's heroes of the threat of devolution. As a result, the alienated past, to which the American of the 'Gilded Age' was linked both genetically and culturally, is demonized and becomes a source of anxiety and terror. 2 Saturated with conflict and change, semi-nomadic life accelerated the running of time, contributing to physical acceleration. In Bierce`s tales, many colonists experience premature aging. This is not a question of senile mentality: this defect of mature, European civilization wasn’t common for Americans. In the American context of the nineteenth century, youth is threatened not by the speculative "experience" inherited from the older generation, but rather by physical deterioration, by the exhaustion of vital forces. In Bierce's stories, acceleration "steals" the middle, mature stage of life from the frontiersman or soldier: his protagonists leave their families too early and return home too late; they exhaust their life resource, before they get mentally mature for house-building, matrimony, fatherhood. 3 The devaluation of senility (antiquity) in the New World was counterbalanced by the idealization of childhood. The blows to which the family hearth was subjected in the feverish atmosphere of the "Gilded Age" intensified nostalgic feelings. Due to the absence of a deep historical foundation, as well as to the fragility of family happiness, the parental home and carefree childhood acquire utopian features in the minds of Bierce's characters. The brighter the infantile ideal shines, the more painfully the grown-up hero experiences the collision with empirical reality. The journey home in Bierce's short stories often ends in a mental collapse, provoked by the debunking of a child's dream.