Крушение

Tagore's legacy is great: he created about 50 collections of poems, more than 30 poems, more than 100 stories, about 2000 songs, 12 novels and a large number of articles on a wide variety of issues. The Downfall was written by Tagore in 1902. By the time of The Downfall, Tagore was known to a wide circle of Indian readers primarily as a poet and storyteller. Tagore managed to give the novel a peculiar poetic coloring, to breathe into it a lot of fresh and original thoughts, and to pose a number of acute social and everyday problems. The events described in The Crash date back to the second half of the 19th century, that is, to the period when the strengthening of capitalism in India led to the completion of the consolidation of the Bengalis into a nation, and caused the breakdown of the old feudal social relations. In the initial period of the development of capitalism in India, the bourgeois intelligentsia was the spokesman for advanced, progressive ideas. Its representatives opposed all sorts of survivals: the custom of self-immolation of widows, early marriages, cruel caste restrictions, strict rituals. In the fight against these remnants, the Brahmo Samaj, a society founded in 1828 by the largest educator of Bengal, Ram Mohon Rai, took an active part. Formally, this society was of a religious nature: the triad of gods of Hinduism, which includes Brahma - the creator god, Vishnu - the guardian god, Shiva - the destroyer god, was opposed by faith in the single, supreme god Brahma. In the initial period of the society's activity, the struggle of the "Brahmo Samaj" against idolatry, rituals, and caste restrictions certainly played a positive role. Tagore's grandfather and father were among the active participants in the society. Tagore himself was rather critical of the activities of the Brahmo Samaj, because in his time it had become extremely degraded and lost its progressive traditions, and many of its members turned into bigots and hypocrites. Tagore's attitude towards such figures is reflected in the novel. Tagore called the novel The Downfall, and it is quite obvious that in this title he symbolized the breaking of the old way of life in Bengal in the middle of the 19th century. Translation from Bengali.