The past is calculated

Marx greatly exaggerated when he wrote that humanity laughed with his past. It was not worth him to speak for all of humanity. Someone laughs, someone cries, someone hates, and someone does not part at all. So he lives in yesterday and enjoys it.

In Russia, relations with the past is purely traumatic. Either painful disappointment, or painful enthusiasm. And the Western man, apparently, somehow arranged a head. He perceives history not as a set of national victories and defeats, but as a personal, purely personal experience. And he takes him, but where to go? Operations with large numbers are haunted by those who are obsessed with ambitions and pride. Operations with small ones do not allow those who are tormented by conscience. Conscience, fear, resentment, loneliness. That is, the feelings are quite human, not nationwide.

All this comes to mind when you read the latest issues of the " foreigner ". Perhaps, we start with the story of Elmore Leonard " Fire in the hole " (lane V. Golyshev) from the first number for this year. This is the story of two friends who once screamed in the American outback. Then one became a policeman, and the second shaved and went to skinheads. “Boyd,” says one to another, “you use the Bible for your own benefit, just like this garbage about the white supremacy: to rob banks, to ugly, to blow up the church in zincinnati for entertainment. Do you see, I do not consider you insane?” - "Reylan, the whole world will consist of mulattos, if we urgently do not share the race?" And so they are faced during the raid of neo -Nazis on the federal tax administration. Burning: a good guy kills a bad guy. Say, banality? And in my opinion, it is necessary. The bad guys have no place in this world. And in general: you need to calculate with the past. If the past does not give up, it is simply destroyed. Otherwise, it can become the future.

In the same issue - Nietzsche's correspondence in the translation of Igor Ebanoidze. Nietzsche is a person who has been gone in this earth for many years. It is not without reason that a prophetic quote is made in the name of this publication: "I am not a person, but fate." The philosopher lived, raved, went crazy, wrote crazy books, more like poems. And all - it would seem, died and calmed down. And instead of life, fate turned out. The dangerous and durable myth, which the sister of the madman, the convinced Nazis Elizabeth Forster-Ninzhe, was happy to promote. My advice to you: Never buy books edited by Forster-Ninzhe. Forster-Nitsha-Anti-Ninsh, not Nietzsche. Only now there was an opportunity to break through dozens of books edited by the sister, to the very philosopher, through Nietzschean - to Nietzsche. One way is correspondence. Here is a quote from a letter to Theologa French Overbek: "I still do not feel the slightest desire to be in the neighborhood of my anti -Semitic son -in -law. His views and my views are different views that I do not regret." Here's also: "I killed Wilhelm, Bismarck and all anti -Semites." There are many such quotes. If you look closely, we have a completely different Nietzsche.

His superman has little in common with Hitler's superman. Nothing at all. It was necessary to possess really superhuman forces in order to endure wild headaches that tormented him in Turin. He signed his letters “Dionysus”, then “crucified”, and this did not look at all a romantic pose. Reality is worse and more interesting than the myth.

The second issue continues to save accounts with the past. It is engaged in German Uve Joneson , the author of the novel Two points of view (per. S. Friedlandland). The thing is heavy, viscous, Kafkian in essence. The main characters, as in the classical plays of the absurd, are indicated by the initials - B. and D. However, any plot from the life of the totalitarian state automatically begins to resemble the theater of absurdity.

Everything is very simple: B. loves D., and this is mutually. But the matter is complicated by the fact that B. is in West Berlin, and D. is in the eastern. The plot is based on a real event - the escape of the future wife of Yonson from the GDR shortly after the construction of the Berlin wall. For a long time, there is no GDR, no wall, nor Yonson himself. He died in 1984, having managed to describe in detail two points of view on this world. The point of view of the slave and the point of view of a free person. And then two worlds, two childhoods merged into one. And it turned out something third - half -free -half -hearteousness. It is still unknown what is better. After all, we are still tormented by nostalgia for those times when freedom and slavery, though the lies existed in its pure form and they could be distinguished from each other. Even evil has its charm when it is in its pure form.

Johnson’s novel is now perceived as a prophetic metaphor. D. loved B. so much that she betrayed her terrible homeland for him. For so long I dreamed of another, better life that when I was free, it was disappointed with it. Freedom is not very interesting, in some places an ordinary thing. Is it a dream. "D. visited the young Mr. B. He was the most ordinary patient for her, no worse and no better than others." For what, one wonders, fought?

I deliberately miss the third number in my review. It is entirely devoted to modern Swedish literature. Throwing the mysterious Scandinavian soul is a separate story. She has nothing to do with our topic.

But in the fourth issue I see two publications that can not pass by. One of them is James's brilliant story by Patrick Donlivi " Lady, who loved pure toilets " (per. S. Ilyina).

With Donlivi in ​​Russia confusion. Then it is called Danlivi. Then they are recorded in the classics of black humor. Apparently, because they cannot really classify. And don't. There is enough blackness in his prose. There is less humor, but also. Here the past appears, but already in the form of a frankly missing life, which you remember about forty -five years.

The heroine dunity moves sequentially along the inclined. First, divorce, then ruin, alcoholism, an attempt to reach the panel? But there was once a real lady. People do not tolerate the jumps on the social ladder. And indifferent - up or down. The past still oppresses, gives rise to unbearable complexes. The main question is here: for what? Why was it so bad for me before? Why is it so bad for me now, but before it was so good?

The lady is just right to hang or shoot, but her love for pure toilets saves her. She comes in search of an ideal toilet on the funeral of some Russian. He leaves a record in the book of guests and, by an absurd accident, turns out to be the heiress of a millionth state. But there is nothing worse than untimely success. Too late. “Finish on a light note,” writes Donlivi. “When a person gets the opportunity to swim in luxury, start life again, he only thinks about how to end her.” Light note, yes.

The second worthy publication is under the heading "Version". This is a study by the German prose writer Mikhail Maara " Lolita and the German Lieutenant " (per. E. Ivanova). Maar analyzes the story of an unknown Nazi journalist Hinnets von Likhberg and compares him with the famous novel by Nabokov. “Antipathy in relation to the Germans, which later grew up to real hatred,” Maar argues, “did not prevent him from understanding German -language literature well.” Here, they say, where the legs grow from. Maybe from there. But hardly only from there.

In fact, we have a real sensation. It is not clear how to relate to this fact. The similarity of motives and images is evident. But what is this - coincidence, plagiarism or literary games? The story of Likhberg is an ordinary romantic fairy tale in the spirit of Hoffmann. Not great, but quite solid. Lolita Nabokov is much more. And Nabokov himself is something more. After all, the time is ultimately won by the one who creates not just a good text, but his own poetics. The world in which you can live. Nabokov created it, Lichberg - no.

We do not know if Vladimir Vladimirovich read the story of Likhberg. This matters only for philologists and literary critics, and that small. In the end, hundreds of other people read the story, but not one of them wrote the novel "Lolita". And I could not do it. What there is no doubt is in the uniqueness of the past. Each has its own. There is nothing to share. Lolit is enough for everyone.