Invisible Man. Wells Herbert

Invisible Man. Roman (1897)

In the inn "Coachman and Horses", owned by Mrs. Hall and her henpecked husband, in early February, a mysterious stranger appears wrapped from head to toe. Getting a guest on a winter day is very difficult, and the visitor pays generously.

His behavior seems more and more strange, more and more alarming to those around him. He is very irritable, avoids human society. When he eats, he covers his mouth with a napkin.

His head is all wrapped in bandages. In addition, the Aiping provincials (a place in southern England) do not understand what he is doing. The smells of some chemicals are spreading around the house, the sound of broken dishes, loud curses that the tenant pours (obviously, something does not work out for him).

Griffin, whose name we will learn much later, strives to regain his former state, to become visible, but fails and becomes more and more annoyed. In addition, he ran out of money, they stopped feeding him, and he goes, using his invisibility, to a robbery.

Of course, suspicion falls on him first.

The hero is going crazy. He is by nature an irritable person, and now this is manifested most clearly. Hungry, exhausted by constant failures with experiments, he takes a crazy step - gradually, in front of everyone, he tears off his disguise, appears before the observers as a man without a head, and then completely dissolves into the air. The first pursuit of the Invisible ends happily for him.

In addition, while escaping his pursuers, Invisible Man runs into Marvel's vagrant, called Mr. Marvel, perhaps because he invariably wears a tattered top hat and is very picky about shoes. And no wonder - nothing is so necessary for a tramp as good shoes, albeit donated ones.

At one fine moment, trying on and evaluating new shoes, he hears a voice resounding from the void. Among the weaknesses of Mr. Marvel is a passion for alcohol, so he does not immediately manage to believe himself, but he has to - an invisible voice explains to him that he saw in front of him the same outcast as himself, took pity on him and at the same time thought that he could help. After all, he was left naked, driven, and Mr. Marvel needed him as an assistant. First of all, you need to get clothes, then money. Mr. Marvel at first fulfills all the requirements - especially since the Invisible Man has not left his aggressive attacks and is a considerable danger. In Aiping, preparations are underway for the holiday. And before finally leaving Aiping, Invisible arranges a rout there, cuts telegraph wires, steals the vicar's clothes, takes books with his scientific records, loads poor Marvel with all this and is removed from the field of view of local inhabitants. And in the surrounding areas, people often see handfuls of coins flashing in the air, or even whole bundles of banknotes. Marvel is trying to run away, but every time Griffin's voice stops him. And he remembers very well what tenacious hands the Invisible Man has. AT last time he was about to reveal himself to a sailor he happened to meet, but immediately discovered that the Invisible Man was nearby, and fell silent.

But only for a while. Too much accumulated in the pockets of money.

And then one day Dr. Kemp, sitting quietly in his rich house filled with servants and busy scientific work, for which he dreamed of being awarded the title of member of the Royal Society, saw a rapidly running man in a shabby silk top hat.

In his hands were books tied with twine, his pockets, as it turned out later, were stuffed with money. The route of this fat man was extremely accurate.

At first he hid in the Merry Cricketers' pub, and then asked to be escorted to the police as soon as possible. Another minute - and he disappeared into the nearest police station, where he asked to be immediately locked in the most reliable cell. And Dr. Kemp's doorbell rang. There was no one behind the door.

The boys must have been having fun. But an invisible visitor appeared in the office.

Kemp found a dark stain on the linoleum. It was blood. In the bedroom the sheet was torn, the bed crumpled. And then he heard a voice: "My God, it's Kemp!" Griffin turned out to be Kemp's university friend.

After Mr. Marvel, frightened half to death, hid in the Merry Cricketers tavern, the Invisible Man, obsessed with a thirst for revenge, tried to break through there, but it ended in disaster.

Invisible Man was already trumpeted in all the newspapers, people took security measures, and one of the visitors of the Merry Cricketers, a bearded man in gray, judging by the accent, an American, turned out to be a six-shooter revolver, and he began firing fan-shaped at the door. One of the bullets hit Griffin in the arm, although the wound turned out to be harmless.

Griffin is a talented scientist, on the verge of genius, but his career was not in the best way.

He was engaged in medicine, chemistry and physics, but, knowing what morals reign in scientific world, feared that his discoveries would be appropriated by less gifted people.

In the end, he had to leave the provincial college and settle in some slum London house, where at first no one bothered him. There was just no money. This is where Griffin's chain of crimes begins.

He robs his father, taking other people's money from him, and he commits suicide.

It is necessary to escape from the house that has become uncomfortable. But for this, you first have to become invisible. And it's a painful process. The body burns like on fire, he loses consciousness. He is terrified at the sight of his own body becoming as if transparent.

When the householder and his stepchildren burst into the room, surprisingly, no one is found in it. And Griffin for the first time feels all the inconvenience of his position. Going out into the street, he notices that everyone who is not lazy is pushing him, cabbies almost knock him off his feet, dogs are chasing him with terrible barking. Gotta get dressed. The first attempt to rob the store ends in failure - But then he comes across a poor shop, littered with second-hand make-up accessories. Its owner is some unfortunate hunchback, whom he ties in a sheet, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to escape and, most likely, dooming him to starvation. And from the shop comes the same person who will later appear in Aiping. All that remains is to cover up the traces of your stay in London. Griffin sets fire to the house, destroying all his drugs, and hides in southern England, from where, if desired, it is easy to move to France. But first you need to learn how to move from the invisible to the visible state. However, things are not going well. The money has run out. The robbery is revealed.

Organized chase. Newspapers are full of sensational reports. And in this state, Griffin appears at Dr. Kemp's - hungry, hunted, wounded. He used to be an unbalanced person, and now he has a mania of misanthropy. From now on, he - the Invisible One - wants to rule over people, establishing a reign of terror for decades. He persuades Kemp to become his accomplice. Kemp realizes that before him is a dangerous fanatic. And he makes a decision - he writes a note to the head of the local police, Colonel Edlai. When he appears, Griffin is initially reluctant to touch him. "I didn't quarrel with you," he says. He wants the traitor Kemp.

But they are already looking for the Invisible One - according to the plan drawn up by Kemp. The roads are strewn with crushed glass, mounted police officers are galloping all over the district, the doors and windows of houses are locked, it is impossible to get into passing trains, dogs are prowling everywhere, Griffin is like a hunted animal, and a hunted animal is always dangerous. But he still needs to take revenge on Kemp, who, after the murder of Adlai, turns from a hunter into a pursued one. A terrible invisible enemy is chasing him. Luckily, already. On his last breath, Kemp finds himself in a crowd of fellow countrymen, and then Griffin is waiting for the end. Kemp wants to save him, but the people around him are relentless. And gradually, before everyone's eyes, a beautiful, but all wounded man reappears - Griffin is invisible as long as he is alive.

Meanwhile, Mr. Marvel has dressed up, bought the Merry Cricketers' tavern with the money stolen from Griffin, and is highly respected in the district. And every evening he locks himself away from people and tries to unravel the mystery of Griffin. Almost his last words: "Here was the head!" Yu. I. Kagarlitsky Griffin, a strange stranger ("he was wrapped up from head to toe, and the wide brim of a felt hat hid his entire face") with a small luggage, consisting of two suitcases filled with papers, books and mysterious vessels, appears in the house Mrs Hall. He attracts the owner of the guest house by his readiness to stay for a long time and pay decently. The main requirement made by G. to the mistress and tenants of the house is the observance of his sovereignty and loneliness.

Alerted by the mysterious behavior of the "guest", the inhabitants of Aiping soon expose the invisibility. Only Kemp, a university friend, G. tells his story. Being engaged in medicine, physics, and in particular the problems of optical impermeability, G. deduces a formula expressing the general law of pigments and refraction of light. Hoping to make a great discovery, gain power and freedom, a poor college assistant conducts experiment after experiment.

In need of money, he robs his father, depriving him of other people's money, as a result of which he commits suicide. Not tormented by guilt, G. blindly strives for the realization of the plan. Finally, after prolonged moral and physical torment, G. becomes invisible. The discovery reveals its destructive power.

Invisible-G. turns out to be socially dangerous. With the help of invisibility, he tries to achieve unlimited power, proclaims new era humanity - an era of terror and violence. G.'s first victim is an ordinary passer-by.

The idea is disastrous for the invisible person himself. G. acquires not only freedom and the ability to penetrate everywhere. He is even more insecure and vulnerable than before. "Invisibility allowed a lot to be achieved, but did not allow using what was achieved." Exhausted by hunger, cold, wounds, he dies "on a miserable bed, in a wretched room, among an ignorant, excited crowd, beaten and wounded, betrayed and ruthless, hunted, having ended his strange and terrible life." Physicality returns to the dying G.. The eyes of the crowd, distraught with fear and curiosity, "see a naked, pitiful, murdered and mutilated body stretched out on the ground ... with an expression of anger and despair on his face."

Bibliography

For the preparation of this work, materials from the site http://lib.rin.ru/cgi-bin/index.pl were used

"He was a man whose word was a ray of light in a thousand dark corners. From the very beginning of the century, everywhere - from the Arctic to the tropics - where young men and women wanted to free themselves from mental poverty, prejudice, ignorance, cruelty and fear, Wells was on their side, tireless, eager to inspire and teach..."

So spoke in 1946 John Boynton Priestley, an English writer of the younger generation, speaking at Wells' funeral. Indeed, Wells devoted his life to helping people "free themselves from mental poverty, prejudice, ignorance, cruelty and fear." Voltaire, Diderot, Swift, the Enlighteners of the 18th century, dreamed of the same thing, and by the time of the French Revolution of 1789 it seemed that they had fulfilled their task. ( This material will help to write correctly and on the topic Biography of Herbert Wells The Invisible Man. Summary does not make it clear the whole meaning of the work, so this material will be useful for a deep understanding of the work of writers and poets, as well as their novels, short stories, stories, plays, poems.) But bourgeois society gave rise to new cruelties, fears and prejudices. And this meant that new enlighteners had to come. Wells was among them - among the main ones.

The great thing about Wells was that he could talk about things that mattered to millions of people. At the same time, he not only answered their questions, but also helped to raise these questions, in other words, to see and realize many of the problems of his own life.

For this, it was necessary not only to know well how the world lives today. It was even more important to know the people you were talking to. Wells knew them well because he was one of them. He understood their fates, their anxieties through his own.

Wells belonged to that stratum of society that truly formed as a mass phenomenon only in the 1980s and 1990s, the democratic intelligentsia. From now on, people who earned their living by mental labor came not from the environment of the clergy and nobility, but from those circles that earlier, especially when it came to literature and art, were not very taken into account: from petty shopkeepers, master's servants, low military ranks, sometimes even from artisans. Of course, such an origin was optional. But from now on, it was they who set the tone. Connected by a thousand threads with their old environment and at the same time rising above it, striving for success and at the same time still sufficiently aware of their responsibility to those in whose name they spoke, these people determined a lot in the spiritual life of Europe. Did they all have the same views? Of course not. But they all agreed on one thing, or almost all of them: a lot of things need to change in the world. They saw their task not in developing the old for the thousandth time, but in discovering the new. They carried in their souls a premonition of some unprecedented change. What will she be? When will it happen? Who knows! But it probably won't be long. And it is necessary to bring this change closer - to loosen the old, disgusting, to show the injustice of life. Who-whom, but traditionalists of these newcomers could not be called. After all, they knew the flip side of the "good old traditions."

Herbert Wells knew her even better than anyone else. His parents were from the "master's servants", who in the 19th century England were almost a separate class - with their own beliefs and prejudices, their own table of ranks, their pride and carefully suppressed feelings of social inferiority. It was the latter, apparently, that forced Sarah and Joseph Wells, as soon as they got married, to seek an independent position in society. It was soon found - in the form of a china shop in small, provincial Bromley. There was a figure of Atlas in the window, and the house was called Atlas House. Bromley Atlas, however, did not have to carry too much weight on his shoulders: the shop was miserable, the little house was shabby. And, worst of all, the shop almost did not bring income. The family was poor. They ate not enough, in clothes they walked with a darn-darned one. But the children were taught, they hoped to bring them into people - for example, to identify them in the manufacturing trade. For more, of course, they did not wave.

Once drawn to him, biology determined many aspects of his thinking for the rest of his life. He was especially grateful for this to zoology, which he directly studied with Huxley. “The study of zoology at that time,” he later wrote, “was made up of a system of subtle, rigorous and amazingly significant experiments. It was the search for and understanding of fundamental facts. The year that I spent as an apprentice with Huxley gave more to my education than any another year of my life, it developed in me a longing for consistency and for the search for mutual connections between things, as well as a rejection of those random assumptions and unfounded statements that main feature thinking of an uneducated person, as opposed to an educated person.

Wells did not leave biology. In 1930, together with his son, a prominent biologist, later an academician, and the grandson of his teacher Julian Huxley, who by that time had become one of the luminaries of scientific London, he published the book "The Science of Life", which was a popular, but very serious and full course this science. Already a very elderly man, he defended his doctoral dissertation in biology. Nevertheless, literature won this rivalry.

Already in his second year at the university, Wells was more engaged in literature than science. In the third year he was already one of the worst students, he did not pass the exams for the last year and received his diploma only many years later. But he wrote several stories and began the story.

This story was called "The Argonauts of Chronos". When Wells, having become an experienced and recognized writer, later read it, he did not like it so much that he bought and burned the entire unsold circulation of the magazine in which it was printed. Finding it later turned out to be difficult, and it was not reprinted until 1961, fifteen years after Wells' death. And then it became clear what ingratitude the writer showed in relation to his early offspring - after all, the whole of Wells went from the Argonauts of Chronos.

Of course, remembering the "Argonauts" with an unkind word, he was right in his own way: the title was pretentious, and the plot was clumsy, and the characters were somehow unnatural. But Wells very soon realized how bad all this was, and rushed to remake his story. When he changed the name, it became "Time Machine". He began to write one after another new versions of it, and situations and images arose from which then grew "The War of the Worlds", "When the Sleeper Wakes", "The First Men on the Moon", and partly "The Invisible Man". In the final version, he discarded these layers. It was necessary to free the plot from everything superfluous that led away. But then he had from where to draw material for new novels, which fell on the reader, as if from a cornucopia.

Wells' rise was triumphant. The Time Machine was still being printed, and enthusiastic reviews of it had already appeared. In the same month that the magazine publication ended, in May 1895, it was published as a separate edition in England and the USA at once. The book made an even greater impression than the magazine publication. It was read avidly, the author was called a genius. Courage and unwillingness to cater to the established opinions of the public, expressive, energetic style, unusual manner, vivid imagination - this is an incomplete list of virtues discovered by critics in Wells after the release of his first novel.

Subsequently, Wells did not speak very favorably of The Time Machine. He found many flaws in her. But the benevolent critics were, perhaps, right, and not he. The time machine invented by Wells turned out to be one of the beginnings of the new science fiction. The range of its flight, the ability to cover distances of thousands of centuries, made it possible to pose problems of great importance and cover hundreds of millennia with a glance. Thanks to it, literature acquired the ability to think on almost the same time scales as biology, rediscovered by Darwin. No wonder subsequent science fiction seized on this idea so much. There are now dozens of "technical" versions of the time machine, hundreds of stories and novels where this "mode of transport" is used, and maybe thousands. Isn't that what gave rise to Wells' dissatisfaction with his novel? He's missed so many opportunities! But was it possible for one person to do all this?

In one respect, however, Wells was right. There is some dryness in The Time Machine. The scale of the author's thinking is unusually large, but all this is stated somewhat in summary. Who, if not the author, was to notice this? And, as always, dissatisfaction with oneself brought good results. In subsequent novels, he tried, without losing the broadest problems of "The Time Machine", to be as specific as possible in everything, to settle everything through everyday life, to deal more with the psychology of his characters.

His greatest success along this path was The Invisible Man (1897).

At first, the fate of this novel was not very happy. Criticism did not understand either the thoughts contained in it, or its artistic merits. The very idea of ​​describing the adventures of the invisible man seemed banal. Haven't invisible people already appeared in dozens of fairy tales? Was this to be expected from a writer who amazed everyone with his scientific fiction? Justice, however, soon prevailed. "The Invisible Man" immediately fell in love with the public, and the critics had to reconsider their positions.

In addition, fellow writers accepted new novel Wells is enthusiastic. Here is what, for example, Joseph Conrad, one of the most popular writers of that time, wrote about him: “Believe me, your things always make the strongest impression on me. what amazes me most is your ability to inject the human into the impossible, and at the same time reduce (or elevate?) the impossible to the human, to its flesh, blood, sadness and stupidity. I won't talk about how happy you found the plot.It should be clear even to you.The three of us (I have two friends visiting now) read the book and followed with admiration the cunning logic of your narrative.It is done masterfully, ironically, ruthlessly and very true." "Wells' strength lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but also a most talented researcher of human character, in particular, of an unusual character," another major novelist, Arnold Bennet, wrote about The Invisible Man. "He will not only skillfully describe to you a scientific miracle, but also will force him to commit himself in some provincial village. He will attack you from the front and rear until you submit to the end of his magical charms. "

It was a fracture. Until then, Wells was often referred to as a scientist who could write. Now they started talking about him as a writer who knows how to think. This change in attitude towards Wells was so profound that he was even reproached more than once for this or that deviation from strict scientific truth.

Such accusations are unfair. Fiction by its nature is connected with what is usually called "incomplete knowledge". When we know everything about this or that subject (or rather, almost everything, since it is impossible to know everything), there is nothing to fantasize about. Wells had a lot to say. He always preferred such plots that would lead to areas of knowledge that were not sufficiently developed. But within the given limits, he achieved the measure of reliability that was possible.

It was the same with The Invisible Man. The fact that Wells chose a plot that was used more than once in fairy tales, of course, made his task more difficult. But he showed me how to deal with it.

True, he had a predecessor in this sense - the American romantic writer Fitz-James O "Bryan. O" Bryan has a story "Who was it?" (1859), which tells of a mysterious invisible creature that attacks everyone who settles in "his" house. The hero of the story manages, however, to overpower him, and he and his friend, the doctor, are trying to find out the secret of his invisibility. These explanations are purely scientific, and in many ways they foreshadow those that Wells will later give in The Invisible Man. However, Wells did it much better.

Over the course of several pages, he argues that if the refractive index of the sun's rays in the human body were equal to the refractive index of air, the person would become invisible. He proves by giving everyday examples, convincing, scientifically undeniable. True, he notes, one can object to this that a person is opaque, but this is true only from worldly, and not from scientific point vision, since the human body consists mainly of transparent, colorless tissues.

Only after this, the popularizer gives way to the science fiction writer, but neither the intonation nor the manner of presentation change, and the reader believes the fiction with the same readiness with which he just believed. scientific truth. It's about this time about how to practically achieve invisibility and what technical means should be used for this. After drinking several specially formulated potions, says Griffin, the hero of Wells, who managed to achieve invisibility, he exposed himself to the action of the rays emitted by the apparatus he built. What kind of rays they were, what kind of apparatus the reader, of course, will never know, but he believes the writer, because all the details of the experiment are presented very reliably. After Griffin made the first experiment, making the cat invisible, it retained the iridescent substance on the back of the eye. Griffin himself after the transformation, "going up to the mirror ... saw a void in which it was barely possible to discern foggy traces of pigment on the retina of the eyes."

Wells was then twice accused of a serious scientific blunder by Bennett in the above-mentioned review of Invisible Man and by our well-known popularizer of science Y. Perelman in Entertaining Physics. The invisible man would be blind, they said. The accusation was unfair. Foreseeing that Griffin's eyes did not acquire complete transparency, Wells prevented him from blindness. True, later he forgot about it and, reading "Entertaining Physics", decided that he had indeed made a big mistake. Having met on August 1, 1934 in Leningrad with Y. Perelman, he apologized to him for her. As the attentive reader can see - absolutely in vain.

Just as thoroughly, Wells explains why the eye has retained pigmentation. It turns out that everything can be made invisible, except for the pigment. If Griffin managed to turn invisible at all, it was only because he was an albino.

These kinds of reservations mean a lot in The Invisible Man. They serve to persuasive storytelling. Everything is available to the magician, but the scientist acts within the given limits. He is constantly compelled to separate the feasible from the impracticable. So by talking about the limitations of Griffin, Wells, in fact, makes us believe more firmly in the scientific validity of his experiment. The former fairy tale somehow imperceptibly and very naturally becomes science fiction.

The authenticity of The Invisible Man is extraordinary. Here everything is clear and tangible. And that makes it especially interesting. The vagrant Marvel and I examine the shoes donated to him with a care that perhaps we never considered our own. Why be surprised - after all, this is the main accessory of his, so to speak, "overalls"! With no less surprise than the heroes themselves, we suddenly notice a glass hanging in the air, and a revolver moving towards a house besieged by an invisible person. We watch Griffin smoke, and for us, as in an anatomy lesson, his nasopharynx is indicated. It turns out to be unusually entertaining for us how a person takes off his shirt, because nothing distracts our attention - it is taken off from an invisible body. We see in each of these moments one thing - a glass, a revolver, bizarre bends of tobacco smoke, a shirt. And so in everything. Subsequently, when English cinematography was being created, Wells took a prominent place in this new art form. But the techniques of cinema can be found in him long before he first saw the first film in his life. First of all, the technique that filmmakers call "close-up". In "The Invisible Man" this technique was especially needed. The fantastic here is proved through the real. Through emphatically real. “In HG Wells, to see is to believe, but here we believe even in the invisible,” one English critic remarked about The Invisible Man.

Is it a fairy tale or a good realistic story?

In any case, the fantastic premise is developed by completely realistic means. Everything that is needed is shown here, everything that is possible is proved.

No, we would be vain to look in The Invisible Man for some kind of secret villain who whispered something in Griffin's ear. There is no such character in this novel by Wells, or in any other that he has written. And yet Griffin does not speak for himself. Not even on behalf of any of his friends. He is a complete individualist, and he has no friends. Paradoxically, he speaks for those he hates.

The city of Aiping is not on the map, nor is the city where Griffin began his experiments. And at the same time, anyone who wanted to could easily see them. To do this, it was enough to visit any of the provincial English towns. Just like Bromley.

There would be exactly the same tavern here, even if its name would not be "The Coachman and Horses", a very similar hostess and, like poured out - a pastor, a pharmacist and other inhabitants. People are all good-natured, unpretentious, and if anything causes their noisy protest, then these are things that would have offended anyone in exactly the same way. Who, say, would like to be grabbed by the nose by an invisible hand? But Griffin hates them. For their narrow-mindedness, for their inertness, for their inability to be even slightly interested in what constitutes the subject of all his interests and the goal of his life - science. But, is it just for that? Is their limitation worthy of such a strong feeling on his part? Of course not. Worse another. Griffin feels his inner kinship with them. He needs the tension of all internal forces in order to break away from them. He doesn't succeed. Except to stand apart. He is the same bourgeois as they are, he expresses their suppressed, unformed, but deeply rooted ideas about strength, power, greatness. Wells later recalled that, while developing the image of Griffin, he was thinking about anarchists. At other times, he might have named someone else. But each time it would be about one or another political current based on the tradesman. True, a special one - enraged.

Griffin is a man who has accomplished a scientific feat, and Griffin is a maniac obsessed with a lust for power, Griffin is a product of the bourgeois environment and Griffin is its victim - what a complex image, deeply rooted in many trends of the 20th century, Wells created! And in what a "strong", expressive, commensurate in all its parts book he wrote!

Is it any wonder that "The Invisible Man" is the most readable work Wells? And not only readable. Several films have been made based on The Invisible Man. Two of them are more famous than the others. The first silent film, The Invisible Thief, was made in 1909 by the French firm Pathé. The second (he was called "The Invisible Man") - in 1933 by the American director James Weil. This film was at the box office and was a great success. Wells spoke of him with praise.

In 1934, he even declared that if The Invisible Man was read no less than in the year of its appearance, then he owed this exclusively to Weill's excellent film. However, he was wrong. Nobody is watching Whale's Invisible Man now; Wells' novel is still being read.

Literary imitations of this novel are also innumerable. Shortly after the release of The Invisible Man, Gilbert Chesterton, an extremely popular English writer in those years, an eternal opponent of Wells, wrote a story about a man "intellectually invisible" - he is not noticed simply because he has become familiar to everyone. Jules Verne followed Wells much closer. This great science fiction writer did not immediately appreciate his English counterpart, and his first interview about him, made in 1903, does not sound very respectful. But already a year later, Jules Verne spoke of Wells in a different tone, and when his novel The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz was published posthumously in 1910, it turned out that in his declining years he even began to imitate him - in this novel, Jules Berne quite closely followed storyline of The Invisible Man. Many imitated Wells after that. "The father of American science fiction" Hugo Gernsbeck used in one of the episodes of his main novel "Ralph 124 C 41 +" (1911), which takes place in 2660, "an apparatus that makes solid bodies translucent" and thus (as long as he irradiates them) invisible. This apparatus was created by the hero Gernsbeck after "experimentation with ultrashort waves convinced him that it is possible to achieve complete transparency of any object if you give it an oscillation frequency equal to the frequency of light". However, this kind of technical detail does not captivate everyone to the same extent as Gernsback. Absolutely, for example, Ray Bradbury did without them in The Invisible Boy, and they would have been out of place in this written as if in Chesterton's imitation of the story of a semi-mad lonely old woman who, in order to keep the boy with her, assures him that she has made him invisible. At moments, however, this paradoxically romantic story is nevertheless very close to Wells. where the old woman tells the boy that invisibility is gradually "washed away" from him and he "manifests" in parts. At some point, he is still without a head, then he is already visible. It is very similar to and that scene from "The Invisible Man" where Griffin, tearing off his bandages and clothes, "melts into the air." It's just that the hero disappears there, appears here. Much has been written on the subject of Wells and other stories, cheerful and unassuming. Such, for example, is the story of the English writer Norman Hunter "The Great Invisibility" (1937) - about invisible glass, which everyone runs into ...

"The Invisible Man" embodied many best features Wells' writing style. Here before us is truly a "realist of fantasy." This gave him such recognition. But The Invisible Man exists in the midst of Wells' other novels. By the time it was created, behind the writer, in addition to the "Time Machine", there was also the "Island of Doctor Moreau", not recognized by his contemporaries, but very soon also became a classic. Ahead were "War of the Worlds", "When the sleeper wakes up", "The first people on the moon". All these, as they are usually called, "novels of the first cycle" were united not only by a common origin from the "Argonauts of Chronos". A single thought lived in them, they were directed towards a common goal.

The same can be said about Wells' stories. As a novelist, he did not act very long. Except for one early experience, A Tale of the 20th Century, published in 1887 in a small student magazine (Wells was then twenty-one years old), and then forgotten for many decades by both the author and, more importantly, the publishers, Wells' stories first appeared in print in 1894 almost simultaneously with the magazine version of The Time Machine. They continued to appear regularly in newspapers and magazines during the years during which Wells wrote novels of the first cycle, but then their flow suddenly dried up, and after 1903 each new story was an event of increasing rareness. The stories included in this collection cover this entire period. "The Stolen Bacillus" is among the first stories that brought fame to Wells. It was already published in June 1894. "The Magic Shop" appeared exactly eight years later, in June 1903, among the stories with which Wells ended his regular activity as a novelist.

Has his style changed over the years? Probably not. Of course, he wrote a variety of stories, but almost everything he could at the end, he knew how to do at the very beginning. Wells' stories, no matter what miracles they are talking about, are always very mundane, often humorous, with many signs and details of life, with laconic, but quite accurate and expressive characterizations. That's where he is always a "realist of fiction"! The unusual is revealed in his stories not to fearless adventurers, but to quite ordinary people, and this clash of the incredible with the ordinary gives the writer the most varied effect. Sometimes we are funny, sometimes we are sad. The Martian expanses appear firsthand to an old antiquary and scarecrow hunted by the family (The Crystal Egg, 1897), and the ability to work miracles goes to a dim-witted clerk, so dim-witted that Wells does not have to work hard to extract from this situation so much comic that, perhaps, would be enough two or three humorous stories. ("The Man Who Could Work Miracles", 1898). In the short story "The Remarkable Case of Davidson's Eyes" (1895), Wells is very serious: he works out on the material of individual human experience one of the hypothetical cases of spatio-temporal relations. But in "The Stolen Bacillus" and "The Newest Accelerator" (1901), he again - although in both cases it is about things of sufficient importance - makes us laugh out loud. What is at least an episode from "The Newest Accelerator" with a dog that fell from the sky! Or the cab races from Stolen Bacillus!

At the same time, Wells does not at all strive to write stories specifically "funny" or, say, "terrible." He achieves a more complex aesthetic effect. Did he really want to make us laugh in The Stolen Bacillus? Of course not. The figure of an anarchist from this story (the first sketch of the image of Griffin) looks both funny and a little tragic. Before us is a man who intends to take revenge on society in a wild and ugly way, but didn’t society harden him so? He is obsessed with megalomania, but is it not because it arose that he was humiliated all his life? Wells' stories cannot be called "flat", they are quite voluminous, and this quality gives them, first of all, the scale of the author's thought. There is a lot to be read behind the simple.

Perhaps the most interesting story in this respect is "The Magic Shop". It belongs to the genre that in Anglo-Saxon countries, unlike science fiction, is called "fantasy" - "fantasy". Of course, we are not talking about science here. The owner of a shop with this quite common name for English children (in London alone there are perhaps a good dozen of toy shops under the sign "Magic Shop") is a real and indisputable magician, moreover, one of the most inventive, endowed with an eerie sense of humor and considerable knowledge of human psychology. But the game he plays with Jip and his father (apparently Wells himself; the writer's son was named Jip, and one of their favorite pastimes was to buy tin soldiers together, the playroom in their house was literally littered with them), is quite instructive. A good (or maybe evil?) wizard wants to show how much a child surpasses an adult in his sense of the miraculous, which means how much more open he is to everything new and unusual, how much more ready to meet possible changes. People who are committed to the habitual, established, this time and forever, were hateful to Wells. In this he saw one of the most unpleasant aspects of bourgeois consciousness for him. This insensitivity to the new Wells wanted to destroy with his stories - both in their form and content. "The Magic Shop" is one of the most successful examples of this.

In the stories and novels of Wells, the world is amazingly mobile and subject to wonderful changes. He is not only capable of changing, - even today's familiar world can be seen in very different ways.

In "The Time Machine" the Traveler, having traveled many millennia, finds the world, new beyond recognition. Human relations have changed, the people themselves, even the map of the sky. But in the same novel there is an episode where the ordinary world is shown in an unusual aspect. Starting off in a time machine, the Traveler saw his housekeeper Mrs. Watchet enter his laboratory and, without noticing him, moved to the door to the garden. "It probably took her about a minute to cross the room, but it seemed to me that she swept with the speed of a rocket." Returning back, the Traveler again sees the same Mrs. Watchet. "But now her every movement seemed to me backwards. First a second door opened at the far end of the room, then, backing away, Mrs. Watchet appeared and disappeared behind the door through which she had previously entered." In "The Newest Accelerator" a similar kind of technique is used. When the heroes are affected by a drug that speeds up the work of the body many times over, the world begins to live for them in such a slow rhythm that people seem to them like wax figures from the Madame Tissot museum ... This technique is unlikely to surprise the modern reader. We are used to it in the cinema, where the methods of accelerated and slow motion are used. But Wells found this technique before the advent of cinema!

At the coachman and horses inn, owned by Mrs. Hall and her henpecked husband, a mysterious stranger appears wrapped from head to toe in early February. Getting a guest on a winter day is not easy, and the visitor pays generously.

His behavior seems more and more strange, more and more alarming to those around him. He is very irritable, avoids human society. When he eats, he covers his mouth with a napkin. His head is all wrapped in bandages. In addition, the Aiping provincials (a place in southern England) do not understand what he is doing. The smells of some chemicals are spreading around the house, the sound of broken dishes, loud curses that the tenant pours (obviously, something does not work out for him).

Griffin, whose name we will learn much later, seeks to regain his former state, to become visible, but fails and becomes more and more annoyed. In addition, he ran out of money, they stopped feeding him, and he goes, using his invisibility, to rob. Of course, suspicion first of all falls on him.

The hero is going crazy. He is by nature an irritable person, and now this is manifested most clearly. Hungry, exhausted by constant failures with experiments, he takes a crazy step - gradually, in front of everyone, he breaks his disguise, appears before the observers as a man without a head, and then completely dissolves into the air. The first pursuit of the Invisible ends happily for him. In addition, while escaping from his pursuers, Invisible Man runs into Marvel's drifter, referred to as "Mr. Marvel" - perhaps because he invariably wears a battered top hat. And he's very picky about shoes. And no wonder - nothing is so necessary for a tramp as good shoes, albeit donated ones. Here at one fine moment, trying on and evaluating new shoes, he hears a Voice resounding from the void. Among the weaknesses of Mr. Marvel is a passion for alcohol, so he does not immediately manage to believe himself, but he has to - an invisible voice explains to him that he saw in front of him the same outcast as himself, took pity on him and at the same time thought that he could help. After all, he was left naked, driven, and Mr. Marvel needed him as an assistant. First of all, you need to get clothes, then money. Mr. Marvel at first fulfills all the requirements - especially since the Invisible Man has not left his aggressive attacks and is a considerable danger. In Aiping, preparations are underway for the holiday. And before finally leaving Aiping, Invisible arranges a rout there, cuts telegraph wires, steals the vicar's clothes, takes books with his scientific records, loads poor Marvel with all this and is removed from the field of view of local inhabitants. And in the surrounding areas, people often see handfuls of coins flashing in the air, or even whole bundles of banknotes. Marvel keeps trying to escape, but every time he is stopped by an invisible Voice. And he remembers very well what tenacious hands the Invisible Man has. For the last time, he was about to reveal himself to a sailor he happened to meet, but immediately discovered that the Invisible Man was nearby, and fell silent. But only for a while. Too much accumulated in the pockets of money.

And then one day Dr. Kemp, sitting calmly in his rich house filled with servants and engaged in scientific work, for which he dreamed of being awarded the title of a member of the Royal Society, saw a rapidly running man in a shabby silk top hat. In his hands were books tied with twine, his pockets, as it turned out later, were stuffed with money. The route of this fat man was extremely accurate. At first he hid in the Merry Cricketers tavern, and then asked to be escorted to the police as soon as possible. Another minute, and he disappeared into the nearest police station, where he asked to be immediately locked in the most secure cell. And Dr. Kemp's doorbell rang. There was no one behind the door. The boys must have been having fun. But an invisible visitor appeared in the office. Kemp found a dark stain on the linoleum. It was blood. In the bedroom the sheet was torn, the bed crumpled. And then he heard a voice: “My God, it’s Kemp!” Griffin turned out to be Kemp's university friend.

After Mr. Marvel, frightened half to death, hid in the Merry Cricketers tavern, the Invisible Man, obsessed with a thirst for revenge, tried to break through there, but it ended in disaster. Invisible Man was already trumpeted in all the newspapers, people took security measures, and one of the visitors to the Merry Cricketers - a bearded man in gray, judging by the accent, an American, turned out to be a six-shooter revolver, and he began to fire fan-shaped at the door. One of the bullets hit Griffin in the arm, although there was no dangerous wound. The search for the body did not give any result, and Griffin appeared at Kemp's at the same time.

From the story that Griffin told his classmate, we learn his backstory.

Griffin is a talented scientist, bordering on a genius, but his career was not going well. He was engaged in medicine, chemistry and physics, but, knowing what morals reign in the scientific world, he was afraid that his discoveries would be appropriated by less gifted people. In the end, he had to leave the provincial college and settle in some slum London house, where at first no one bothered him. There was just no money. This is where Griffin's chain of crimes begins. He robs his father, taking other people's money from him, and he commits suicide. Griffin has no remorse. He is so focused on his work that he does not take into account any other considerations. Finally, the hour of the long-awaited opening arrives. But how to live on? Money is running out, neighbors and the householder suspect him of something. He is too unlike the others. And he does something strange. It is necessary to escape from the house that has become uncomfortable. But for this, first become invisible. And it's a painful process. The body burns like on fire, he loses consciousness. He is terrified at the sight of his own, becoming as if transparent body.

When the householder with his stepchildren bursts into the room, he, to his surprise, finds no one in it. And Griffin for the first time feels all the inconvenience of his position. Going out into the street, he notices that everyone who is not lazy is pushing him, cabbies almost knock him off his feet, dogs are chasing him with terrible barking. You have to get dressed first. The first attempt to rob the store ends in failure. But then he comes across a poor shop, littered with used make-up accessories. Some unfortunate hunchback is in charge of it, whom he ties in a sheet, thereby depriving him of the opportunity to escape and, most likely, dooming him to starvation. But the same person who will later appear in Aiping comes out of the shop. It remains only to cover up the traces of your stay in London. Griffin sets fire to the house, destroying all his drugs, and hides in southern England, from where, if desired, it is easy to move to France. But first you need to learn how to move from the invisible to the visible state. However, things are not going well. The money has run out. The robbery is revealed. Organized chase. Newspapers are full of sensational reports. And in this state, Griffin appears at Dr. Kemp's - hungry, hunted, wounded. He used to be an unbalanced person, and now a mania of misanthropy is ripening in him. From now on, he - the Invisible One - wants to rule over people, establishing a reign of terror for decades. He persuades Kemp to become his accomplice. Kemp realizes that before him is a dangerous fanatic. And he makes a decision - he writes a note to the head of the local police, Colonel Edlai. When he appears, Griffin is initially reluctant to touch him. “I didn’t quarrel with you,” he says. He wants the traitor Kemp. But the colonel has a pistol borrowed from Kemp, and he falls as another victim of Griffin. Then follows the completely senseless murder of Lord Burdk, who is armed with just a cane at the sight of an iron rod hanging in the air.

But they are already looking for the Invisible One - according to the plan drawn up by Kemp. The roads are covered with crushed glass, mounted police officers are galloping all over the district, the doors and windows of the houses are locked, it is impossible to get into passing trains, dogs are prowling everywhere. Griffin is like a hunted animal, and a hunted animal is always dangerous. But he still needs to take revenge on Kemp, who, after killing Adlai, turns from a hunter into a pursued one. A terrible invisible enemy is chasing him. Fortunately, already on his last breath, Kemp finds himself in a crowd of fellow countrymen, and then Griffin is waiting for the end. Kemp wants to save him, but those around him are relentless. And gradually, before everyone's eyes, a beautiful, but all wounded man reappears - Griffin is invisible as long as he is alive.

However, the last actor of this novel - not Kemp, not Griffin, but Mr. Marvel. He dressed up, bought the Merry Cricketers tavern with the money stolen from Griffin, and is highly respected in the district. And every evening he locks himself away from people and tries to unravel the mystery of Griffin. Almost his last words: “Here was the head!”

retold

The protagonist novel Griffin, the invisible man, a brilliant scientist who made amazing discovery, but did not present him at the scientific council, as he was afraid that his invention would be appropriated by a not as talented inventor as he was. The invisible man commits many crimes, he hates people and wants to control them. In pursuit, he meets the poor fellow Mr. Marvel, whom he forces to help him. As a result, the poor fellow can not stand it and hands him over to the police. Invisible is killed, and he becomes visible.

The novel teaches that one should not interfere with nature, otherwise it can lead to irreversible consequences.

Read the summary of Wells' Invisible Man

The action of the novel takes place in the tavern "Coachman and Horses". In this place, in the bitter cold, out of nowhere, a strange stranger appears. For this time of year it's a rare thing. The owners of Mrs. Hall and her husband are happy with the guest, but this happiness does not last long. People around begin to notice the stranger's unusual behavior. He is wrapped from head to toe, covering his mouth when he eats. No one knows what the guest is doing. Cursing words and the noise of breaking dishes are constantly heard from the room, it smells chemicals. Apparently Griffin, that's how to call a stranger, something does not work out.

The hero wants to return to his former appearance, but it does not work out for him, so he is very angry. Griffin ran out of money and, using his fortune, he decided to rob.

The scientist is gradually losing his mind. By himself, he is an unrestrained, irritable person, which is clearly seen in the last period of his life. Griffin makes a rash act. In front of a large audience, he takes off his disguise and appears before everyone as a headless man, and then completely disappears. For the first time, Invisible managed to elude law enforcement. While chasing, Griffin runs into poor Mr. Marvel, who was wearing a tattered black top hat and admiring his boots.

While the tramp was trying on shoes, he heard a voice from the void. Mr. Marvel liked to drink alcoholic beverages and therefore at first did not even pay attention to it. But an unknown voice explained to him that he saw the same unfortunate person as he himself and decided to ask him for help. First of all, Invisible asked to find clothes and money. At first, Mr. Marvel clearly did everything that the hero instructed him, since Griffin still did not lose his tyrannical behavior and could be very dangerous. In Aiping there is a thorough preparation for the celebration. Invisible arranges a complete rout there, takes his personal belongings. Marver wants to run away from the tyrant, but he fails. He repeatedly tried to tell the police everything, but he was stopped by a voice from the void. Marvel understood perfectly well what this threatened him with. But he wasn't going to remain silent forever.

One day the talented Dr. Kemp was sitting at home doing scientific work. And suddenly he saw a man who was running in a black top hat with a pile of books. The stranger was hiding in the Merry Cricketers tavern. Then he went to the nearest police station.

Kemp heard the doorbell ring, but no one came. The doctor thought that the local boys were frolicking, but he saw blood stains on the carpet, crumpled bed linen. Suddenly, Kemp heard an invisible voice. Griffin recognized his classmate.

Invisible decided to take revenge on Mr. Marvel, but he could not get into the tavern. The city has long been aware of the Invisible, all the newspapers wrote about him. One visitor had a pistol in his hands, with which he wounded Griffin in the arm. He came to Kemp.

Griffin told a classmate how he got to this point.

Griffin is an outstanding scientist, but he failed to realize himself in scientific activity. He was a specialist in medicine and exact sciences. The hero knew perfectly well what was going on in the scientific department and therefore was afraid that his brilliant discoveries would be appropriated by another not as talented scientist as he was. He began to live in a small London house and engage in science. Everything was fine until he ran out of money. Griffin steals his father's savings. The latter commits suicide. The hero does not regret anything, he is completely immersed in his discovery. The day Griffin has been waiting for is coming. He feels that his body is on fire, he becomes ill.

When the owners enter the house, they do not find the guest. Griffin sets fire to the house, completely destroying the records of his discovery.

The hero hates all people. Invisible wants to subjugate all of humanity and invites Kemp to cooperate with him. The latter realizes that he is talking to an abnormal fanatic. He turns to the police to Colonel Adlai. At first, Mistyfoot does not want to deal with the Colonel, but in the end, he kills him.

The Invisible is being chased. He was caught. Now a handsome, wounded man appeared before the people. Griffin was invisible alive, and dead - became visible.

Mister Marvel used the money he took from the Invisible Man to buy clothes, a tavern, and began to live happily ever after.

And the publicist Herbert George Wells is the author of many fantastic works that glorified him throughout the world and translated into many languages: "The Time Machine", "The War of the Worlds", "People Are Like Gods", "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and others. Fantasts have repeatedly predicted incredible scientific discoveries, this is a well-known fact. Wells, by the way, long before Einstein and Minkowski showed in the novel The Time Machine that real world is nothing more than a four-dimensional space-time substance.

In another book ("War of the Worlds"), the writer predicted modern wars with the use of toxic substances and What did Wells come up with in his most paradoxical and popular work - "The Invisible Man"? A brief summary of the answer to this difficult question would sound like this: his hero made an attempt to change and speed up the life processes in the body. How seriously the scientific community takes writer's fantasy can be seen from the fact that the book caused a storm of discussion. The calculations were made the most reasoned from a scientific point of view. The conclusion of scientists was unequivocal: the invisible state contradicts common sense, which means it is impossible. This dispute began in 1897, from the moment the work was published, and has not yet ended.

So, Herbert Wells, "The Invisible Man", a summary of the novel. The main character, the brilliant physicist Griffin, appears in a small tavern on a chilly day, wrapped in a raincoat and hiding his face under a hat, bandages and huge glasses. It is impossible not to notice his strangeness, he arouses the curiosity of others.

Gradually, the reader learns that the strange visitor, whom G. Wells describes from the first lines, is an invisible man. He tells his story to an old friend, also a scientist named Kemp, and the reader will then find out what happened to him. Griffin conducted experiments, invented an apparatus that makes a living organism invisible, and a drug for bleaching blood. When there was not enough money for experiments, he conducted the experiment on himself, deciding to take on such an unusual appearance and get a lot of benefits from it. But everything turned out to be not so simple, and Wells vividly describes his ordeals.

"The Invisible Man": a summary of the novel about the superman

Yes, this is precisely the task the author sets himself: the evil genius, who has opposed himself to all mankind, cannot and should not survive. It is strange that the filmmakers allowed themselves to interpret the accents that Wells clearly placed in a different way. "The Invisible Man" (a summary of the idea of ​​the film of the same name by A. Zakharov) found such an embodiment on the Russian screen: Griffin is a misunderstood talent, and Kemp is an evil genius who is trying to prevent him from making great discoveries to save humanity. It's not like that in the novel. G. Wells himself has an inversely proportional relation to this. The invisible man (the summary cannot contain all the brightness of the dialogues and discussions of the characters) is the same evil genius who wants to create a reign of terror and, through the fear of people, seize power over the world. But he is powerless alone, he needs shelter, food, help, and therefore he came to Kemp's house.

He, however, is not going to help him, he understands that the madman must be stopped, and calls the police in secret from his guest. The persecution of Griffin begins, and he, in turn, opens the hunt for a friend who betrayed him. The reader catches himself thinking that sometimes he sympathizes with this anti-hero - he experiences too sophisticated methods of persecution, as Wells describes, the invisible man. The summary of the book quite vividly conveys the inhuman suffering that a person who wished to rise above everyone found himself in.

The hero is very vulnerable: he is invisible only completely naked, but if he gets hurt or dirty, takes food or water, he begins to leave traces. This is what hunters use. The roads are strewn with broken glass, the whole world is up in arms against him and is persecuting him. After all, he is only alive and unharmed, as Wells writes, an invisible man. The main characters, perhaps, are himself, the evil genius who challenged humanity, and the rest of humanity. And he is defeated. Life leaves him, and gradually the transparent outlines of a pathetic, wounded, naked “superman”, an albino Griffin, who turned his talent as a scientist into evil, gradually appear on the earth. And so he lost.