Introductory Notes. David Herbert Lawrence(1885-1930) was born at East­wood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth of five children of a miner and his middle-class wife

David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at East­wood, Nottinghamshire, the fourth of five children of a miner and his middle-class wife. He attended Nottingham High School and Nottingham University College. His first novel, The White Pea­cock, was published in 1911, just a few weeks after the death of his mother to whom he was very close. His career as a schoolteacher was ended in 1911 when he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis.

From that time Lawrence devoted himself to writing. His great­est novels The Rainbow and Women in Love, were completed in 1915 and 1916 but he could not find a publisher for them. After the war Lawrence began his "savage pilgrimage" in search of more cre­ative mode of life than industrial Western civilisation could offer. He travelled to Cicily, Ceylon, Australia and, finally, New Mexico. He returned to Europe in 1925, quite unwillingly because he hated Eu­rope, but he had contracted malaria which, in addition to his tubercu­losis, could have killed him within a year. By then he was already actively painting. In 1928 his novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, was banned; he was sued for it and his paintings were confiscated. He died in Venice in 1930 at the age of forty-four.

Lawrence spent most of his short life in writing. He pro­duced an amazing quantity of work — novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, and letters. After his death his wife Frieda wrote: "What he had seen and felt and known he gave in his writing to his fellow men... a heroic and immeasur­able gift."

In New Mexico Lawrence found something that was very

important to his general vision of the world; he found a name for

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his dark god "as shaggy as the pine trees and horrible as the light­ning." That name was Pan. The essay Pan in America states his position most fully; Pan figures in many of his stories not only as an abstract life force and a necessary counterbalance to the Chris­tian ideal, but also as a terrifying supernatural presence like Di­onysus or the Great God Pan, wreaking a terrible vengeance upon those who deny him. There is an amusing painting by Dorothy Brett of Lawrence upon a cross. Dancing before him is a horned and goat-footed figure who also bears the face of Lawrence. The "god theme" was also important in his novel, The Plumed Ser­pent, written and completed in Mexico.

It was in 1927 that he began to write the story called The Man Who Was Through with the World. Lawrence himself was such a man at times; he strongly felt the attraction of the hermit life. The story was abandoned and left unfinished, probably, be­cause it was too close to its author. He himself wrote about it: "I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away towards the inner realities that are real: and return to the world later, when one is quiet and sure." For Henry the Hermit there is a choice between Scylla and Charybdis: to allow oneself to be swallowed by the world, exposing oneself to "the pollution of people," or to withdraw to the island of oneself and die the spiri­tual death of solipsism. One cannot tell whether Henry is going to lose his grip on life as the winter advances and die for lack of human contact, or whether the following spring will see him en­ter the world again, resurrected.

Task for comparison:

The Man Who Was Through with the World — Уйти от суеты

THE MAN WHO WAS THROUGH WITH THE WORLD

There was a man not long ago, who felt he was through with the world, so he decided to be a hermit. He had a little mon­ey, and he knew that nowadays there arc no hermitages going rent-

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