Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov died

died in the hospital after his injuries On October 3, Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov . The injuries were allegedly incompatible with life, but his truly powerful, heroic body fought to the last. Nothing foreshadowed the death of this large, vigorous man, full of plans and strength. It is impossible to believe what happened - he was always so lively, active, interested in life, he loved so much about it and still wanted to do so much. A completely unnatural, savage death.

They will talk a lot about the scientific merits of Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov, and they will probably say it better than me. They, these merits, have not yet been fully comprehended. One thing is clear - a truly great philologist has left, and with his departure the connection between our generation and the great Russian philology of the first half of the 20th century, of which he was a direct heir, has already been completely broken. They will still write about all this, articles and books will be published in his honor, and this is good, but is that really the point? During his lifetime he was not deprived of fame, but he did not acquire anything - no positions, no bonuses, no simple opportunity to calmly go about his business, without worrying about his daily bread. We know his wonderful books about ("The Poetics of Chekhov", 1971; "The World of Chekhov", 1986; "Anton Pavlovich Chekhov", 1987; "Word-thing-world. From Pushkin to Tolstoy", 1992)), his articles about Pushkin , Gogol, his works on the history of Russian philological science, but how bitter it is to think that the titanic work on a complete Chekhov bibliography has not been completed, the mind-blowing “total commentary” to “Eugene Onegin” has not been written, the book of memoirs that he was working on remains unprepared I really wanted to work lately, but there was no publishing order for it, an order that would allow me to drop everything and sit down to finish writing a book - this is what he dreamed of. And no one will ever be able to realize these plans. To live is to do what someone else won’t do for you. Alexander Pavlovich lived and did his job - and this life ended so abruptly and terribly, so suddenly for everyone!

But he managed to write his main book - the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps”, which caused so much noise, almost received, but did not receive the Booker - a wonderful Russian book, which, not without reason, was compared with Herzen’s “ The Past and Thoughts ”, and I would She also compared it with Pushkin’s “ Onegin ” in the sense that the author revealed himself in this book to the fullest extent possible. From its pages, not only the authentic, preserved Russia appeared to us, but also its author himself - in an image that was unexpected for many, in a way that he was not very well known in “narrow scientific circles.” Then, when the book gained unconditional success and recognition, he, as if justifying himself, said that he was simply forced to write it - he was so bursting with the knowledge he had acquired throughout his life. And this knowledge was truly immense and sometimes stunning - both in the natural sciences, and in the humanities, and in theory, and in practice. “I wanted to somehow free myself from all this,” Chudakov said, as if embarrassed, “and so I found this form: a novel.” In academic circles such “sideways steps” are not held in high esteem, but how voraciously this book about life in distant Chebachinsk was read by wide circles of open-minded intelligentsia, both “humanitarian” and “technical”! They read it because this book is, first of all, talented, because its author was fully endowed with the talent of knowledge, the talent of words and, most importantly, the talent of living.

How could you not admire him when, putting his glasses in his boot on the shore, he covered a hundred meters of water with a luxurious butterfly stroke, or, on the contrary, went under the water to emerge on the other shore in a few minutes! A couple of years ago, he said with regret that he used to easily swim a hundred meters underwater, but now only 70-80. Swimming was his special love, and perhaps his calling - in his youth he was predicted to have a brilliant sports career, he did not follow this path, but with what pleasure he carried out swims in Pushkin's Soroti - one, I remember, was a swim in honor of the storming of the Bastille, the other - named after A.P. Chekhov. And when he came ashore, he, a strict academic scientist, put on a white shirt, tie, jacket, brought with him in neatly folded form, exchanged sneakers for boots and went to make a report at a conference on “Eugene Onegin”. And in the evening, having exchanged his white shirt for a vest, he sat in the kitchen, telling endless stories from his own and other people’s lives and patiently waiting for real, properly cooked boiled buckwheat porridge, which he was a big fan of. And for children, he composed on the fly, with a calm face, and one of these stories, told to my daughter during her early childhood, was about two brothers - one ate more and more candy, and the other - buckwheat porridge, and then they went to India to a weight lifting competition, and the correct brother, of course, won, but the wrong one was put to shame and then, of course, he also switched to buckwheat porridge.

He never missed an opportunity to sit and talk, and to have first, second and compote, or better yet vermouth, but other things are possible, and how wrong are those who believe that you should drink ascendingly and without mixing. They, he said, deprive themselves of the variety and joy of life. I only remember the joy of communication from him. Nothing irritated him, he was in agreement with people and in agreement with the world, which was completely open and completely interesting to him. He knew every tree and every bird, was a true friend of cats and dogs, was well versed in soils, in camel breeding, for example, and in whale breeding, in all natural sciences, it seems, and in all the humanities, and in various technologies, and only he it was possible to reliably find out whether it was worth insulating the chimney with alabaster. He was very interested in whether I was building a country house correctly, he taught me to put a thirty on the edge under the roof - it turned out well.

Anyone who visited Alexander Pavlovich’s dacha had the opportunity not only to understand something important about himself, but also to think in general about man’s relationship with the world around him. Almost everything there is made with your own hands and you can see how a person can change the living space around him, bringing beauty and order, culture and intelligence into it. He uprooted stumps and “stepped into the swamp” (this was pronounced with taste, with pride), grew an ideal lawn, fencing it with a special curb stone, built a fence from boulders, transporting them on a bicycle rack from the surrounding quarries. With the help of some Egyptian lifting mechanisms, these boulders were raised to the required height, placed on the mortar, and over the summer the wall increased by two meters. I gasped when I saw in what orderly and beautiful order the tools were kept in his shed - the quotes in his last printed text were arranged in the same beautiful order. And in the winter - birthdays were traditionally celebrated at our favorite dacha - he gave us guest felt boots and led everyone into the forest in twenty-degree frost, complaining that the forest was not cleaned and now it was dying, and the whole village had to get together and clean it, otherwise it would overgrow.

I want to say something special about his last text, and not only as the compiler of the “Pushkin Collection” and the customer of the material. We are talking about his article “On the problem of a total commentary on “ Eugene Onegin ” ” - from it we can judge what his grandiose research plan was, how it could be implemented and what we lost. I cannot resist the need to quote the beginning of this text:

The empirical world around us is physically continuous, and this continuity is absolute: man in his non-speculative existence (and not associated with such phenomena as particles, antiparticles) is not given a space free from any materiality.

But for consciousness, the empirical world is heterogeneous and separate. Only in this way does a person have the opportunity to orient himself in it from childhood, only by speculative effort establishing the substantial community of classes of things and their hierarchy. Relations of mutual assistance, biological symbiosis and other ecological connections do not violate global heterogeneity. A lichen growing on a stone remains a lichen, and a stone remains a stone. The more actively a lichen uses its “foot”, the more it becomes a plant and the more it differs from a stone. It can be argued that organic bodies will sooner or later turn into organic humus. But while they are externally and morphologically independent, for ordinary consciousness they are heterogeneous.

Science has long been accustomed to seeing all things in their connections. The substance of a dish cannot be described biologically and gastrologically without the most distant links in the chain: sun - soil - grass - water - lamb - kebab.

Objects of the artistic world are initially homogeneous: all things of a literary work, regardless of their conceivable material quality, are subject to laws common to all of them and express a certain unified principle. However, literary descriptions of literary texts, by analogy with the empirical world, usually work with discrete units: hero - motive - plot - realities - word, etc. An "item-by-item" consideration of these problems does not study all the elements together, in their natural interrelation in the process of the forward movement of the text. Such a study can only be carried out through slow, non-selective reading and analysis.

“Eugene Onegin” needs such commentary reading most of all - continuous reading, without gaps, word by word, verse by verse, stanza by stanza.

We should not delude ourselves with the thought that our ideas coincide with the readers of Pushkin's time - even about the simplest things, for example, about the sled in Chapter I. To compensate for this at least partially, it is necessary, as in the scientific description, to resolve a chain of issues, in this case, the harness and crew issues. How does the sleigh on which Onegin rides to Talon differ from the village ones? Are they big? Where did you usually ride them? Are they open or closed? How many horses? What is the harness? Russian? German (without arc)? With lines or shaft? What place do these sleds occupy in the crew hierarchy? Why does Onegin go to the ball “in a Yamsk carriage”?

I am writing and writing out all this hot on the heels of his death, his voice rings in my ears, and in these questions I hear his always insatiable interest in the details of the surrounding world and his close attention to the details of the literary text. These two interests have a common root in the depths of his personality. At one of the presentations of the novel, Alexander Pavlovich said that the list of vital things that Robinson Crusoe rescued from a sunken ship once made a formative impression on him. Here are the origins of his philological predilections (remember his works on the objective world and the role of detail in Chekhov’s work), here are the origins of his novel, in which preserved material culture is elevated to the rank of the highest spiritual value.

Alexander Pavlovich has spoken a lot about the total commentary on Eugene Onegin in recent years, made brilliant reports and read fascinating lectures to students. It seems to me that this was his favorite idea, which combined his interest in the material world in literature with the linguistic-stylistic analysis of the text in terms of the “structural interaction of verbal units.” A favorite student of V.V. Vinogradov, he was, perhaps, the only living philologist who could carry out such an analysis. We talked with him about how good it would be for him to go to our pathetic Pushkin group IMLI and, as part of his planned work, sit and write this endless total commentary, receiving a meager academic allowance for it. But even this seemed unrealistic then. And so he left, and with him went his plans, his capabilities, his unique research approaches, his colossal overflowing memory, his bright personality, his special physical appearance - everything collapsed suddenly and wildly, and, looking around, I see with horror, that there are almost no great people left from that older generation of Russian philologists with whom my life connected.