The enemy of paradoxes

For the last decade and a half, our book publishing has been working in emergency mode, making up for almost a century of lost time. Therefore, some lawns are trampled in a very bizarre sequence. Either the memoirs of Poplavsky will be published before Poplavsky’s poems, or Ellis’s “Unpublished and Uncollected” will be published, despite the fact that there is still no canonical collection of his works. And since foreign classics of the 20th century are presented on our book market hardly more fully than domestic classics, and there are plenty of white spots, they are also black holes, here too, then there are no less strange things happening here.

For example, the Bridges of Culture publishing house published a wonderful book, “Paul Celan. Materials, Research, Memoirs.” However, for all its remarkableness, the publication of such a collection seems a rather paradoxical gesture. If most of the pillars of modernist poetry from Yeats and Eliot to, say, Ginsberg are available to the Russian-speaking reader today in a more or less decent form, then the fate of the Russian Celan has so far been extremely unsuccessful: several collections in anthologies in Soviet times, a couple of small books and a number magazine publications - in the post-Soviet period. Now, it seems, one of the Moscow publishing houses is preparing a representative “Selection” - but, as far as is known, it does not include the original texts of the Austro-Jewish poet, and without this, of course, the publication of translated poems largely loses its meaning.

Although, perhaps I exaggerated things a bit. Recently, interest in Celan seems to be growing in Russia; many of his poems are presented in Russian in several translations at once. Let’s say, there are a variety of versions of the textbook “Death Fugue”: there is an arrangement three times larger than the original text, made by the luminary of the Soviet translation school Lev Ginzburg, there is a “canonical” and very musical translation by Alexei Parin, where, however, for metrical reasons, Shulamith turned into Rachel, there are relatively new translations by Anna Glazova and Olga Tatarinova, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, and amateur exercises that are not difficult to find on the Internet. Celan also penetrates into Russian literature - for example, a fragment of the same “Death Fugue” sounds as a leitmotif in “The Potato Eaters” by Dmitry Bavilsky . Nevertheless, all these “achievements” are hardly enough to be proud of, if we remember that we are talking about a poet who for several years was considered a real contender for the Nobel Prize, a poet whose poems in German-speaking countries have long been included in school anthologies.

However, one can see its logic in the fact that the book about Celan appeared before a full-fledged edition of his poems. The scale of the poet and the extreme semantic condensation of his texts (this especially applies to Celan’s late work) have led to the fact that today he is one of the most studied authors all over the world, and the number of comments on his poems many times exceeded the number of things he himself wrote. Celan's work was addressed by Derrida, Gadamer, Kristeva, and Levinas (the latter's essay was included in the volume published by Bridges of Culture). The Celan Society exists in Holland; monographs dedicated to the poet were published in France, Japan, not to mention Germany.

But in those same countries the work of other major European modernists has long been studied, but in our country there are practically no books of this kind. That is, if Celan’s poems are, alas, late for the Russian reader, and quite a lot, then as an object of academic research he was ahead of almost all the masters of world poetry of the last century. The same Eliot or, say, Pound do not have such “personalities” in Russian, and among the relatively close analogues, the only thing that comes to mind is “Russian Cavafiana” , released several years ago by OGI.

After these general considerations, it is probably necessary to say a few words about the book itself, especially since I have already called it wonderful. The collection includes articles by Russian and foreign researchers; some have been published previously, others are published for the first time. The volume is divided into three parts: the first examines the general principles of Celan poetry, including the principle of dialogicity; in the second - Celan’s creative exchanges with Russian poets, primarily with his beloved Mandelstam, whom he translated extensively and successfully into German (Nadezhda Mandelstam considered Celan the best European translator of her husband’s poetry); finally, the third part analyzes Jewish motifs in Celan’s work (particular attention is paid to echoes of the Kabbalistic tradition) and publishes some biographical materials. Following the first issue, a second is expected, which should include several more works of a general nature, memoirs of contemporaries about the poet, and analyzes of individual poems.

At the presentation of the collection, its compiler, Professor of the University of Jerusalem Larisa Naidich, told how the color scheme of the cover was selected. The fact is that most books about one of the most tragic poets of the 20th century, who survived the death of his family during the Holocaust and committed suicide in 1970 by throwing himself into the Seine from the legendary Mirabeau Bridge, are traditionally published in black bindings. However, it is known that Celan himself did not like black, preferring light colors, and asked his wife to dress in blue. Therefore, the publishing house chose a blue and white color scheme for the design, and used images of plants mentioned in Celan’s poems as screensavers. I thought it would be a shame if this story disappeared.

Since we are talking about the paradoxes of domestic book publishing, we cannot avoid talking about archival publications and the principles of commenting on them. So the “Young Guard” started publishing a quite nice “Library of Memoirs”, also known as “The Near Past”. Several very good books were published in it - for example, the diaries of Lydia Berdyaeva (the philosopher’s wife), prepared by Elena Bronnikova, or the memoirs of the little-known poetess Nina Serpinskaya “Flirting with Life,” commented by Sergei Shumikhin. Recently, the tenth issue of the series appeared - Olga Mochalova’s collection “Voices of the Silver Age” (compilation, foreword and comments by Alla Evstigneeva), which included two cycles of memoirs, “Literary Meetings” and “Literary Companions,” and several books of poetry.

Mochalova’s memoirs look like incompletely whitewashed drafts. This is probably due to the fact that during the poetess’s lifetime there was very little hope for their publication. They are built according to the “nominal” principle (chapter about Nikolai Gumilyov, chapter about Vyacheslav Ivanov, etc.), but those expecting to find here a lot of new things about famous people will probably be disappointed. Like, in general, most memoirs, Mochalova’s notes are significant not for specific facts, but for the general sense of time. Therefore, the more intimate “Literary Companions,” which deal primarily with little-known, background figures—Varvara Monina, Mikhail Malishevsky, Georgiy Obolduev—are more interesting than “Literary Meetings,” with their stories about the central characters of the era.

The specifics of Mochalova’s memoirs require special vigilance from the commentator. The author admits: “Nothing was written down by me in my time, when literary life was in full swing nearby ,” but assures that “the passages preserved in my memory are firm and accurate . ” However, the published memoirs are replete with errors, up to elementary confusion in the names of the persons mentioned and the titles of works. To the commentator's credit, most direct errors have been corrected, although it seems that in some cases the explanations could have been more complete.

Here's just one example. Mochalova recalls how Gumilyov told her: “Yesterday in the Union some man kept following me on my heels and reading my poems... I was tired of him. “Who are you?” I asked. It turned out that this was the murderer of the German ambassador Mirbach Rainbot " A. Evstigneeva quite rightly notes that Mochalova was mistaken, Mirbakh was shot by Yakov Blyumkin, and it was he who was “on the heels” of the poet. However, it would obviously be useful to explain who Rainbot is - an iconic figure in Russian politics at the beginning of the 20th century, a Moscow mayor, removed from office and put on trial for, as they would say now, misuse of budget funds. Why did he take Blumkin’s place in Mochalov’s text? Is it because he died in the same year, 1918, when Blumkin shot Mirbach? Or because the attempt on Mirbach’s life preceded Kaplan’s shot at Lenin, after which the leader was recovering in Gorki, Reinbot’s former estate? It’s a mystery, but the information about Rainbot at least provoked the reader to think this way.

Some chapters of Mochalova’s memoirs (especially in “Literary Meetings”) are simply a quotation collage - this is how, for example, an essay about Balmont is constructed: phrases from the poet himself, Marina Tsvetaeva’s story about his life in France. In general, the memoirist often refers to information received from third parties, often indicating the source of information only with initials. This, of course, complicates the task of the commentator, but does not at all negate the need to clarify such points. A. Evstigneeva mentions in the preface “initials that cannot be deciphered ,” but in the commentary she does not disclose even those that would not be difficult to explain. For example, there is no doubt that I.N.R. from the essay about Mayakovsky - this is Ivan Nikanorovich Rozanov, P. from the chapter on Blok - Nadezhda Pavlovich, called by his full name a few paragraphs later, and M.T. from the Gumilevsky part - Margarita Tumpovskaya.

Sometimes the commentary is too laconic, sometimes it is redundant to the point of being funny. If Georgy Obolduev says: “Pushkin’s best works: “Count Nulin” and “The Golden Cockerel” , it is hardly worth giving this fragment a note consisting of the dates of writing and the first publication of two Pushkin works. Similar footnotes look just as strange - when it is written , when printed - to all Pasternak's poems mentioned in the text. However, probably, the commentator himself had nothing to do with this at all and this was the demand of the “Young Guards”.

External conditions can also explain the absence of a name index in the collection - although, say, there was one in Sierpinska’s book. But question marks instead of death dates for a number of relatively little-known writers can no longer be attributed to publishing arbitrariness. Meanwhile, some of these gaps can be easily reconstructed from the scientific literature: for example, Natalya Benard died in 1984, Fyodor Zhits died in 1952, Taras Machtet died in 1938, and about Georgy Deshkin, say, even on the Internet you can find a lot of interesting things .

The explanation of Tsvetaev’s phrase addressed to Mochalova, given in the preface and repeated in the publisher’s annotation, is hardly accurate: “You are a great poet... But you are a poet without a second birth, and there should be one . ” According to A. Evstigneeva, Tsvetaeva was thus hinting that “Mochalova’s poems were almost never published . ” It seems, even without taking into account the obvious reference to the title of Pasternak’s book of poems, it is obvious that we are talking about something completely different, namely about the monotony of Mochalov’s manner, which has not changed over the years, about the poetess’s lack of a “path”, or, to use Tsvetaev’s word, “history” ". Among other things, it is quite difficult to imagine Tsvetaeva, who in 1940 reproaches Mochalova (and indeed anyone else) for not publishing enough.

As for Mochalova’s poems, they are left without commentary at all. It is not known why, out of almost one and a half dozen handwritten books by Mochalova, these five were selected for publication; it is not known whether they are fully printed, it is not known which poems were published earlier...

However, all this is nitpicking. A. Evstigneeva created a quite clear, almost 60-page commentary - using little-known materials, with links to archival manuscripts. The memoirist's memory errors have been corrected, dark places in the text have been largely clarified, additional sources have been indicated - what more could you want?

Moreover, there are plenty of examples around that are much sadder than the shortcomings of a conscientious commentator. For example, the St. Petersburg publishing house "Retro" republished the memoirs of Ida Nappelbaum, the daughter of the famous photographer, Gumilyov's student. A book called “Angle of Reflection: Brief Encounters of a Long Life” has been published more than once - and each time without the slightest hint of comment. During this time, it managed to acquire a preface, an afterword, and now even an annotated name index has appeared, quite professionally compiled, but again there is no commentary. This means that there is no reason for conversation - not to start now discussing the memoirs, first published, it seems, more than ten years ago.

Therefore, we quickly pass by the St. Petersburg edition of Nappelbaum’s memoirs and move on to a curiosity of a completely different kind. In the series “Secrets of the Third Reich”, published by “Eksmo” together with its subsidiary “Yauza”, a book by former Soviet intelligence officer Vitaly Chernyavsky “Himmler against Hitler” was published. In fact, the book has three completely independent parts, and the two “Gs” are discussed only in the first of them. The second is called “Bormann: life after death” (it is proven that Bormann died when he died), the third is “Was Heinrich Muller an agent of Beria?” (the correct answer is no).

There is not too much new in V. Chernyavsky’s research, but the facts are collected and presented well, the author is not prone to historical fantasies, and therefore the book turned out to be quite readable and useful. I'm just wondering: who decided to decorate it with applications? In particular, who came up with the idea to include in it an “interesting article” by the American historian Mark Weber, “exposing” the famous “Nazi hunter” Simon Wiesenthal ? Apparently, it is clearly not V. Chernyavsky himself - there are conceptual discrepancies and factual discrepancies between his text and Weber's text - so all confusion should be addressed to the editor of the volume, M. Chernov. He will probably be able to explain why there was any need to include material about Wiesenthal in a book where his name is mentioned only a few times.

One way or another, for the first time in my memory, a reputable publishing house with an innocent look puts in a book material from which it follows that there was no trace of the Holocaust, all this is an invention of Wiesenthal and company. Moreover, he also respectfully reports that Weber is the director of the California Institute of Revisionist Historians. If anyone doesn’t know, revisionists in this case are those who revise the history of the Second World War, primarily the conclusions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, arguing, in particular, that there were no gas chambers, and if you look properly, then no death camps at all.

And one last thing. I've always wondered why, as soon as people decide to print some nasty stuff, the first thing they do is the syntax disappears, competent proofreaders and translators scatter, and as a result, Laurence Olivier turns into "Olyzer" on the very first page , and Ben Kingsley becomes "Ben" Kigsley " Maybe M. Chernov will tell you more about this?