The Great Gatsby, a story of tragic disillusionment
Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the 'author of the Jazz Age', managed to uniquely capture the atmosphere of the first post-war decade in the USA.
In his best-known novel, Gatsby tells a story of great love, dazzling social rise and tragic disillusionment. 'I began to count the expenses of my time before the bills were written,' Fitzgerald remarked on his interest in depicting the carefree life of the American socialites spending a fortune at endless parties filled with bootleg Prohibition liquor. The 1920s, which included a path through the battlefields of World War I, ushered in a period of dazzling boom in the United States that was not ended until the New York Stock Exchange crash of 1929.
Also set in the early 1920s is Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, whose narrator, a young post-war returnee named Nick Carraway, comes to New York from the Midwest to try his luck as a stockbroker. Chance brings him to a sublet next door to the fabulous mansion of the mysterious rich man Jay Gatsby, whose spectacular parties are attended by half of New York every week. Without initially knowing why, Nick attracts the interest of a wealthy neighbour, and because he has a habit of listening rather than resisting, he soon becomes Gatsby's confidant. And then a helper in his attempt to win back the girl he loved, whom he lost five years ago when he went to the front. But not even the fabulous fortune Gatsby has amassed since returning from the war can redeem the past and turn the dream into reality. In the end, Gatsby's dream of fatal love turns out to be a mere chimera. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a story of multiple human passing and the tragic failure of an illusion. The author portrays his heroes with critical distance and at the same time with extraordinary empathy. The ambivalence of their characters and the sense of a kind of inexhaustible mystery that keeps drawing generations of readers and creators to tell their stories. R. Venclova
