The purpose of our investigation is to provide certain materials that might prove useful, both in content and form, for students' fuller comprehension of literature created by the leading American authors of the XIX century.

Texts of imaginative literature are used at the Foreign Language Faculty of the Pedagogical University, Tula during almost the whole period of studies. They are employed primarily as a source of linguistic information, as a store of everyday topics for conversation, reproduction and the like. Literary pieces - works of outstanding writers are used, almost exclusively, as an aid in learning the language. The analytical reading course contains literary and stylistic commentary as well as questions and tasks on the content and style of the selected pieces of American narrative prose. It provides a set of tasks with the view to helping students discover the content and style for themselves. The methods used in contemporary style study are mostly based on a linear (verbal) analysis of the text, i.e. they all represent a linguistic approach to the style of the literary work. There are other approaches. Those that proceed from the fact that literature is primarily one of the arts may be tentatively defined as an aesthetic trend. The basic assumption in this trend is that a literary work, though expressed in words, does not exhaust itself in linear word sequences. It involves both linear (verbal) and non-linear (supraverbal) components, such as composition, genre, image and the like. This fusion of Stylistics and Theory of Literature is usually called Interpretation of the text. The most free form of work with the literary text is, of course, the aspect known as Home Reading. But any literary work is a work of art, of verbal art, to put it more precisely, and its main function, the aesthetic one, is only casually referred to, if not altogether ignored. Such practice results in the students' developing an oversimplified attitude to literature, an inability to grasp the message that is imaginatively expressed.

It is a well-known fact that the reader's appreciation of the book depends upon one's personal experience. A literary work that represents the epoch and social/cultural settings familiar to the reader will, no doubt, be more profoundly perceived by a person than that of an entirely alien setting. The reader's appreciation of  the literary work also depends upon his age and education, as well as upon his intellectual and emotional impressionability, the innate ability to share in the attitude of others. The gift of appreciation develops when one gains experience in reading. But he who has, besides, some knowledge of the verbal art laws will more subtly perceive the poetic content than one who lacks such knowledge. I mention all these aspects in order to stress the fact that although each of them is very important in its own way they are all closely connected and interpenetrative. They constitute a unity and contribute to the students' better understanding of literary texts. And literary texts constitute the bulk of any national literature. National literature is in its turn an inseparable part of national culture. So, working with authentic literary texts taken from books of American writers we give our students an opportunity to get acquainted with American culture.

Besides, our major task is not only to teach students to perceive a work of literary art more profoundly and subtly but to make them able to use the acquired theoretical knowledge, skills and methods in their work with pupils at school.

The course of Theory and History of Foreign (British and American) Literature investigates the historical and social background as well as the literary context of the works of imaginative literature. The curriculum limitation of the time allotted for the lecture course makes more or less extensive information for the students' reference indispensable. Students should be given a chance of selective approach and at the same time be encouraged to undertake analytical surveys and discussions based on problem-solving approaches to literary texts.

The forms of these discussions may be the following: the students prepare either collective or individual presentation. The first form suggests that the students of a team decide all by themselves which of the members will prepare
a) a historical and social survey of the given period;
b) study and interpretation of the author's works;
c) study of the problems raised by the writer against the background and in the context of the literary tradition.

Individual  presentations mean that the teacher gives the tasks himself and the students are supposed to prepare mini-presentations on the given issues and to supply factual materials, critical comment and to organise class discussion.

The study deals primarily with Mark Twain's art. His diverse works can be easily placed in the intellectual and historical context typical of the American literature of the period considered. Mark Twain is a fascinating subject for such a study because he addressed the philosophical questions of freedom and constraint, of optimistic and pessimistic approach to man, humanity, historical progress and life generally. In the life and work of a good many American writers of the XIX century there is a pattern so recurrent it cannot be dismissed as merely accidental: a career that begins with buoyant energy, full of pleasure and democratic optimism, ends despairingly, full of bitterness and misanthropy. With a writer like Mark Twain, who in his best fiction is the master of the American idyll, the final vision of life is bleak, angry, unreconciled.

Because Mark Twain was a great, and extraordinarily funny humorist, it was fashionable in his own time to suppose that there was no serious side to him or to his work. Partly for the same reason, it has frequently been supposed, now that his serious and significant depths are acknowledged, that his creative personality must have been split. Depending on the acuteness of his perceptions of incongruity and the dislocations of things, the major humorist is naturally more detached and so more critical than the rest of us. But he must also be somehow a lover of life, deeply committed to his own perceptions of beauty, goodness, truth. From the paradox come both the force of his comic insight and all his sorrow. The qualities of Mark Twain's outlook and literary achievement fit that pattern neatly.

Mark Twain's triumphant entry into the American literature in the 1860s marks the cultural emergence of a new area of American life, the mid-continental heartland. As a distinctive region, the Mississippi Valley represented something sharply different from the Eastern seaboard. Its economy, its social relationships, its geographic sense, its cultural tone, its very use of the English language - all were more insular and plebeian, rough and self -sufficient than those of the New England or mid-Atlantic states. The mark of the pioneer was still visible, the memory of the Indians still strong. And the literature that began to be composed in this part of the country was naturally distinctive, too.

The work of the early Twain is marked above all by exuberance, the energy and gaiety of a man who does not feel the weight of the past heavy on his shoulders, who believes implicitly in the good nature of himself, his characters, and his readers, and who, almost unawares, exudes the self - delight of a burgeoning young culture. Between Twain's early - and to a lesser extent, his late work - one can detect several subliterary traditions. One of those is the humour of the old Southwest, which provided him with some of his basic materials and techniques - the tall tale, the deadpan spinner of the tall tale whose glum manner serves to accentuate the extravagance of what he is recounting, the contrast between the accomplished prose the author is capable of employing, and the picturesque dialect of his backwoods characters. Another one may be defined as the tradition of Western story telling, with its pleasure in physical experience, its easy-going acceptance of rogues and worse, its mockery of the tenderfoot from back East, its friendly commerce with the natural world, and its freedom from Eastern nail-biting moralism.

Besides, Mark Twain had the added advantage of the example set by the literary comedians of his time (his friend Artemus Ward or Josh Billings, for example), who did pieces for the newspapers in which they would pose as semi literate running a seven-year war against traditional spelling, but still notable for their shrewd common sense. These men made much of their living by lecturing, as Mark Twain came to do, and had worked out carefully the technique of appealing immediately and directly to a large audience. They knew especially how to achieve that authentic expression of subject matter which was the end toward which the writer about the West, whether he knew it or not, was striving. Mark Twain learned from them certainly. But he soon  moved beyond these cultural sources, developing the comic technique into one which enabled him to render with full poetic force the very essence of Western America. In him, the way of the reporter was gradually transformed into the way of an artist. In his best Western writings he not only records, but creates: he develops metaphors and images, he consolidates detail, he registers the essentials of Western speech, achieving an idiom that remains true and natural even though it has been trimmed and modified for the purposes of art.

The travel and Western humour genres in which Twain served his literary apprenticeship and by which he achieved his first fame reached their peak in "Roughing It" (1872), were revived in "Life on the Mississippi" (1875) and were integral to his manner throughout his career. Here indeed is the beginning of the American style, colloquial but not scrappy, relaxed but not sprawling, vivid but not exhibitionist. It is a style that derives from but transcends speech: it has the directness and ease the people like to associate with, though in fact are rarely present in, speech.

Besides, what Twain expressed in his earlier  writing  with both good nature  and  ironic sharpness was the notion,  deeply grounded in American folklore,  that in the West life was more "natural"  and  men were more unspoiled than in the effete and "cultured" East. Westerners of course loved this,  feeling that after all those decades of  Boston tyranny, their  day  in American writing had finally come.  Easterners liked it too, for it spoke to their nostalgia for a simpler and better America, no longer to be found along the Atlantic but movingly evoked in Twain's books.

One of Twain's major achievements is of course "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884),  by common consent one of the world's great books. This novel is an idyll of boyhood, a parable of fraternity breaking past the social obsessions of the race,  a deadly accurate portrait of the society of the Mississippi,  an account of a boy's initiation into the entanglements of moral judgement,  a stirring dream of a moment of perfect freedom, and a moral fable about the conflict between friendship and conscience, humane impulse and law.

The impulse  to freedom embodied in the escape of Huck and Nigger Jim is a freedom that cannot be confined to,  or even adequately described in,  social terms.  It comes into spontaneous existence, and not as a matter of status obligation,  or legal right. It exists as an active relationship,  a  shared  capacity for sympathetic identification with the natural world,  which is seen neither as inherently good  nor inherently bad  but as a resource which those with the proper sense of reverence can tap. Or it can be a sympathetic identification with other men,  which is  seen in the novel as something to be learned,  so that the learning becomes a way of moving past mere learning and received morality.

The painful contrast between the Arcadian promise of early American democracy  and  the  disappointments brought about by its phase of industrial and financial power would haunt Mark Twain through all  his later years;  and  in  "Huckleberry Finn" this theme finds oblique but unforgettable representation.  "The Adventures  of  Huckleberry  Finn" holds optimism  and  pessimism about human nature in an almost equal, and aesthetically very powerful,  balance of tensions. Here, as it were, he  looked two ways:  toward the West and the Mississippi country, where all could have been right;  and toward the East,  where all  was wrong.

If we consider regionalism as one of the leading features in the XIX-century American literature, then Mark Twain was a kind of regional writer, but a very peculiar one. Twain of the '60s was the frontier story-teller,  the great folk writer of the American West,  and he raised to a pitch unrivalled before him the art  of  oral  story-telling and then succeeded in transferring its effects to paper.  This was Mark Twain's peculiar note,  the craft that he  exhibited  in  his early short stories,  the art that reached its highest point in "Huckleberry Finn". Mark Twain established a form and a style that were later to be vastly influential in American writing.  There,  in reliving the scenes of his youth in the Mississippi Valley the writer was  great. In this  recollected  atmosphere his genius flowered freely as it never could in the atmosphere of the world he lived in, - the  world of which he wrote in "The Gilded Age", the world of the post-war United States.

In 1872 Twain moved to Hartford (Connecticut). The Western writer now became the settled figure of Eastern society and probity.  But reminiscences of  the freer,  fuller life in the West could not help him find happiness in a life in an East where freedom and fullness  seemed always just  out of reach.  Still we must observe that the peculiarity of Mark Twain lies in the fact that as the time passed he  became  the Eastern writer  too, although  in a very special way.  He was able to adapt himself as an artist into the context of  the  Eastern  literary tradition in many ways:  it showed itself in the refinement of style, on the one hand,  and in the philosophic search and contemplation, on the other.  We shall not dwell on the problem at large because its aspects are diverse and very complicated.  We shall touch upon only  one of them - Twain's interpretation of the image of history.

"The Prince and the Pauper" and "A  Connecticut  Yankee  in King Arthur's Court" deserve treatment in their own right.  In a sense they both follow the same pattern: comic fantasy provides circumstances for attacking aristocratic  privilege  and  pretence in the name of common humanity and its right to compassion and respect. The cult of romantic medievalism is held up to hilarious derision.  The theme of both books is well summed up by the Yankee when he observes that "there  is  nothing diviner  about  a  king than there is about a tramp,  after all". Both books go to considerable lengths to picture the tyranny,  superstition, ignorance,  brutality,  and  squalor which were the lot of the common man under feudal conditions.  "A Connecticut Yankee", particularly, pleads strongly that democracy,  education, science, rationality, and tolerance - conceived to be characteristic of XIX-century Connecticut as  opposed to the Southern states of the period - are infinitely superior to all the "sham gauds" of what Mark  Twain  elsewhere called  the "chivalry - silliness" of "Sir Walter Scottism."

That country was progressive which gave its people the best material standard of living. In this attitude Mark Twain spoke for his country as well as himself,  a culture that savoured facts over theories; that liked  tangible things of life rather than dead traditions;  that looked forward rather than backward.

In all  these  Twain  was simultaneously the child of the XVIII century and of the "advanced" thought of his own period. His faith in reason and democracy belonged to the afterglow of the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras. But he found it easy to transform his rationalism into the anti-romanticism,  even the agnosticism,  of Robert Ingersoll and of his friend W.D.Howells. Yet for  all  the  self-assurance of these books about European history, there is a subdued but strong  darkness  in them,  too.  The "Yankee" proposes  that a man is ineffaceably noble when he is true to himself. His goodness and his powers need only be called out by  knowledge and education.  Mark Twain accepted the optimism of this view in the main; but even his Yankee found it susceptible of disenchanted meanings: "We speak of nature;  it is folly; there is no nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training.  We have no thoughts of our own,  no opinions of our own;  they are transmitted to us,  trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable  or discreditable to us,  can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from,  a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam -clam or grasshopper or monkey from  whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me,  all that I think about in this  plodding  and pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life,  and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me. ..."

The little exempted atom of individual soul, worth saving and capable of salvation,  which the Yankee had discovered,  went out like a spark. Now Mark Twain talked and wrote incessantly about "the  damned human race".

All his disillusion is summed up in Twain's last important imaginative creation,  "The Mysterious Stranger".  In 1906 he had worked up the same pattern of ideas in a  privately  printed extended  dialogue which he called "What Is Man?" The idea is simply that,  morally speaking, man is a collection of mechanical effects exerted by nature  and nurture, his heredity and environment. Free will is a stupid illusion, and conscience a hapless disease of the soul,  since no one  can  help being what he  is  or  doing what he does.  Basically "The Mysterious Stranger" is a drama in which the depravity,  stupidity,  and viciousness of the human race are graphically demonstrated by Satan,  in this case a young angel and,  ironically (considering the way he acts),  an unfallen relative of the better-known Lucifer.

There was no progress, and the future held more horror than anyone dreamed of. The sum total of human misery kept pace with the sum total of human material progress; the balance remained the same. Man was the same as  in  ancient  times;  only the costumes changed.  The material progress Twain once thought beneficent and which  he  praised  in  the form of railroads,  steam engines, and sanitation might be fatal after all. The more opportunity it gave for prosperity the more it fed man's base desires. Perhaps progress, like revolution, ate its own children.

A man might be optimistic in youth,  but only a fool was hopeful after middle age.  And it was all predetermined,  for no one mastered either his own fate or his own self.  He was at the mercy of the sum  of  his past, his environment, and a biologically endowed temperament that made him sanguine or gloomy, good or bad. He could overcome nothing, and in the  end everything  was all an illusion.  As Satan told his young charges in "The Mysterious Stranger":  "...There is no God, no universe, no human race,  no earthly life,  no heaven,  no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought,  a useless thought,  a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

He vanished  and  left me appalled [says Theodor] for I knew, and realised, that all he said was true." These last words of the book represent an ultimate,  eloquent nihilism for Mark Twain. They are designed to destroy all the notions of rationality, factuality,  and  causality on which the science and most of the philosophy of his time were built.  It was the darkest view  in contemporary American letters, the more surprising for its source.

But the despair over man and the fury at man's  wickedness which inform "The  Mysterious  Stranger" and some of the later sketches link Mark Twain with many of the modern writers of succeeding generations.

All we can note with any assurance is that Twain's writing on the problem seem to point in two directions, both of them relevant to much of his later thought.

On the one hand, there is more than a hint of that theory of history which  Twain  was  elaborating elsewhere:  civilisations rise and fall, human character seems to progress or progresses for a short while until there arise those circumstances (e.g. material prosperity and such signs of social complexity as  the development  of  classes  and centralisation) which  prey  on basic human weaknesses (greed and love of power - or the reverence of power) and draw men  back  into  barbarism. On  such a theory of history Twain could logically postulate the early glory of science and an idyllic Jeffersonian America,  a  simple and slumbering Eden, which could be superimposed on childhood memories of Hannibal.

On the other hand, perhaps human character simply did not ameliorate, perhaps "average man remains exactly the same",  and even extraordinary people are eternally repeated in  the  same proportions.  If this were true, civilisation at any time and place was nothing but the hypocritical mask worn by man to conceal the baseness of his  thoughts and meanness  and  cruelty of his actions.  The function of the honest writer was to tear away the mask.  Twain was impelled late in life  to violate the  idyllic image of Hannibal repeatedly,  even compulsively, in such works as "Pudd'nhead Wilson",  "The Mysterious Stranger",  and "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg".  Hannibal,  in short, was not the most idyllic of societies,  only the most hypocritical; essentially it was every town, anywhere, anytime. As a complex of meaningful and distinctive historical values, however, it has ceased to exist. The final meaning of history was that history,  at least in human terms,  had no meaning.

For the  later Twain,  escape from the wheel of time into a realm of more substantial values was an obsessive need.  His favourite novel "The Personal  Recollections of Joan of Arc" (1896) was such an escape from reality into a false purity. Indeed, any simple chronological division of Twain's thought permits us to point tendencies,  to isolate theories and note influences only at the expense of ignoring the complexity,  at any given time, of his response to human experience and the artistic problems (often  unsolved) posed to his work by this complexity. So I tried to prove the fact that even the  works  of  a  well known and conspicuous writer deserve thorough investigation and we can always find some new, absolutely unsolved issues and themes for  discussion and research,  for example: "Mark Twain and Southwestern Humour", "Mark Twain and his Image of Childhood" or "Mark Twain's Image of History".