Initially, the lost generation was called people whose youth fell on the period between the First and Second World Wars. They had their heralds - E. Hemingway, E. M. Remark, W. Faulkner … But was it only at that time that whole generations were "lost"?
The lost generation is people who have lost or have not found the meaning of life. Initially, this was the name of the youth who returned from the fronts of the First World War - and found that there was no place for them in a peaceful life.
For the first time this term was used by the American writer Gertrude Stein, and her words were used as an epigraph to the book "The Sun Also Rises" by E. Hemingway: "You are all a lost generation." This term expressed the main problem of young people of those years: strong, courageous people, whose youth passed on the fronts of the First World War, who saw death and pain, who were lucky enough to return, were suddenly thrown to the sidelines. In a new, peaceful life, no one was interested in truly important things: how brave you are, what kind of friend you are. The only important thing was how much you earn! And in general, the values that they held dear, it seemed, were not needed by anyone.
It so happened that the brightest representatives of the "lost generation" were writers - E. Hemingway, W. Faulkner, E. M. Remark, F. S. Fitzgerald and others. Not because they were the most “lost,” the most “out of place,” but because they became the voices of a generation. Their worldview of "stoic pessimism" was visible in all their works, which almost always told about love and death - "Farewell to Arms!", "Three Comrades", "The Great Gatsby".
However, it would be unfair to say that only one generation was “lost”. Later, this term began to be called all those generations that grew up on the rubble of revolutions and major reforms. In the same America, for example, a whole generation of the 60s "lost", who did not want to live according to the old, conservative foundations and protest against the war in Vietnam - it was not for nothing that hippies and beatniks appeared at this time. True, this generation already had completely different voices - for example, D. Kerouac.
In Russia, the generation that grew up in the 90s, when it was obvious that there was no return to the past, and the future did not promise anything, "fell out of the cage". The youth of the 90s suddenly found themselves in a new world, where the word “engineer” became almost a curse, and money openly and shamelessly ruled political and social processes.
Well, in the end, there were always enough people who were uncomfortable in their own skin, their society and their time. As E. Jong wrote: "Perhaps every generation considers itself a lost generation, and, perhaps, every generation is right." And it's hard to disagree with her.
