Translated material
Self -Emergener of the Desert
The first publication of a documentary about a white general, who restored the independence of Mongolia, was released in 1993. Almost ten years later, AD Marginem publishes an updated and supplemented version. Leonid Yuzefovich was the first in Russia to study the phenomenon of Ungern. The “executioner and neurasthenik”, which seriously tried to create the Mongol Empire - and it is thanks to him that Mongolia today is the country itself, and not one of the provinces of China.
In the early 1930s, Arvid Ungern-Sternberg began collecting materials for the conceived, but never written biography of his famous cousin. When he turned to the general relatives with a request to send memories of him, the warning of one of them followed: “If you write a biography of the novel, relying only on reliable facts, it would be colorless and boring. With a more artistic description, there is a danger of replenishing the already large number of stories told about it. ”
However, even the authors, who did not claim to be “artistry”, faced the mystery of a sudden transformation of an ordinary white general into a Mongol khan and the god of war. The origins of this metamorphosis were looking for on his first trip to Mongolia, coloring it with completely fantastic details. Wrangel wrote that in battles with the Chinese he showed miracles of courage, received a princely title as a reward and was appointed commander of the entire Mongolian cavalry; Others claimed that a baron with a gang of thugs robbed caravans in Gobi; Still others sent him to the Hunhus. In fact, since he was forbidden to serve with Jah Lama, he entered the Supreme Officer in the Verkhneudinsky Cossack Regiment, partially stationed in Kobdo, and lived here without special adventures, hoping, apparently that the fading war would flare up again, but this did not happen. Soon the Russian-Chinese agreement was signed on the autonomy of external Mongolia, and in the spring of 1914, having received documents from Blagoveshchensk about his resignation, Ungern left for his native Revel.
According to his cousin Arvid, even then he "acquired vast knowledge about the country and the people inhabiting it." According to Knyazev, Ungern “heard the voice of a genuine, mystically attracting him to Mongolia” and “filled with moods to the edges”, which cause “her bizarre temples” and “green carpets of immense pales, and her people, as if waiting for a mighty push to wake up from a century of sleep”. If you discard the beauty of the style and the transparent hint that in the end the Mongols waited for the man who gave them this “mighty push”, everything was like this. Ungern has repeatedly said that during the first trip to Halhu, "Vera and the customs of the Mongols he really liked."
In Cobdo, he began to study the Mongolian language, in which he later spoke quite tolerably. They wrote that he managed to make “big acquaintances with princes, gagenes and influential lamas”, but this is unlikely. The news is even more sophisticated, that at the same time, “not being the zealous son of the Lutheran Church,” he secretly “accepted Lamaism”. Passion for Buddhism is just an option for people who are ordinary for people like an amateurish interest in the “wisdom of the East”.
This interest was shared by the famous philosopher, Count German von Kaiserling, a fellow countryman and a distant relative of Ungern, who came from the family of Ungern-Ikskulya. He was five years older, but they could meet in childhood or in early youth. In any case, Kaiserling has repeatedly mentioned Ungern in his books. Both belonged to the close circle of the Estland aristocracy; It is no accident, apparently, later the younger brother of Ungern, Konstantin, married the daughter of Kaiserling. In 1911-1912, he made a trip around the world, visited Japan, China and India, and upon returning to Estland, the two -volume “waybill of the philosopher” that glorified his name wrote. By the impression that this book made on contemporaries, it can be compared only with the "sunset of Europe" by Spengler. Due to the war that soon began, she saw the light only in 1919, but was completed five years earlier; Ungern, returning from Kobdo, could read it in the manuscript. “I was so obsessed with the east that I could not imagine myself a Western man for a long time,” Kaiserling remarked at that time. In this, Ungern was his spiritual double.
Unlike Kaiserling, he did not try to transfer his Mongol impressions to the paper, but he must have been pleased to feel like a wanderer who touched a completely different world. The East was in fashion, the interest of the listeners fueled the imagination. No wonder the opinion was in a related circle that the novel has a rich imagination and himself believes in his own fiction. As a rule, this property is attributed to those who are sympathetic, mistaken in the degree of self -deception, but in any case it implies the fervor and enthusiasm of the narrator. Usually silent, closed, Ungern with loved ones was different. With their sympathetic attention, he could excite in himself the exciting consciousness of miracles experienced in Asia, as the hero of the “gift” of Vladimir Nabokov, a traveler in Mongolia and Tibet: “During sand storms, I saw and heard the same thing -“ a whisper of spirits who call to the side, ”and among the strange flickering of air endlessly passing towards the whirlwinds and the troops of the ghosts, and the troops of the ghosts, ghosts Thousands of ghostly faces. "
However, Ungern was more occupied by Asian miracles of a different kind. Once, talking with Kuzen Ernst about the situation in the Far East, he remarked: "Relations there are formed in such a way that with luck and certain dexterity, you can become the emperor of China." This was meant General Yuan Shikai, the president of the Republic of China, who tried to establish his own dynasty, but some personal note is heard here, otherwise the interlocutor would not remember this phrase and would not repeat it two decades later in a conversation with the biographer of Ungern. An example of Yuan Shika showed that in the destroyed structures of power, the path to its top can be fabulously short.
Even in Kobdo, Ungern said, he first thought about the possibility of restoring the Manchu dynasty in China with the help of the Mongols. At that time, these were completely speculative thoughts, but at the end of life, the Qing restoration plan, in order to influence the revolutionary Russia and bourgeois Europe, will become its obsessive idea. He will die in the conviction that "the salvation of the world should come from China."
Baron Alfred Mirbach, the husband of the unified sister Ungern, wrote about him, referring to the opinion of his wife: “Only people who personally knew the novel can objectively evaluate him. One thing can be said: he is not like everyone else. ”
If it is easy to suspect an exaggeration caused by related feelings, then the Russian settler Ivan Kryazhev, who lived in Mongolia, left a similar evidence, the face is absolutely not interested. He remembered Ungern in life in Cobdo in 1913 and said that the baron behaved "so alienated and with such oddities that officer society wanted to exclude it from its composition, but could not find facts that were wandering the honor of the uniform."
And further: “Ungern lived completely on an individual, he was not found with anyone, he always stayed alone. And suddenly, for no reason, at another time and at night, he will collect the Cossacks and through the whole city with a hood rush to them somewhere in the steppe-to drive wolves, or something. You can’t really understand. Then he will return, forbidden at home and sits alone, like a sen. But, the defense of God, he did not drink, was always sober. He did not like to talk, he was silent more and more. "
Kryazhev’s story about Ungern ends with an accurate and expressive observation: “It seemed that something was missing in him.” There are no mistakes here-something was not enough for him, but “in it”. This voidness betrayed itself in the eyes. Burdukov speaks of "faded, frozen eyes of a maniac"; Another memoirist describes them as “pale”, the third-as “soulless, tin,” the fourth recalls “watery, bluish-gray, with nothing indifferent, some indifferent”. Apparently, he had poorly-eyed muscles poorly developed, whose game gives the look an infinite number of shades. Usually this physical defect is associated with the underdevelopment of the emotional sphere.
“The heart, mercy in it was absent,” wrote Colonel Tornovsky, who served under the leadership of Ungern. In one phrase, he outlined the type of this person, which was hardly formed only under the influence of Nietzscanism, without support in organicism: "He did not tolerate the orpers and miserable."
According to his contemporary, not once with Ungern met, he "did not care at all about the impression made, it did not notice the shadow of any posture." This speaks as much about the strength of character as the absence of a need for purely human connections. Ungern did not correct his behavior by the reaction of the interlocutor, she did not interest him. Emotional fading made it possible not to notice other people's feelings, to consider them not worthy of attention, which have no value.
Here, the strange untidiness for the German aristocrat originates, even sloppiness - non -triumphed mustache and hair, dirty, or even torn clothes, but there was no hint of challenge to the dull philistine accuracy or the conventions of a military caste. He did not change linen for weeks and did not give it to washing, but threw it away when it turned into rags. The rooms where he lived was kept in a terrifying mess and almost did not have furniture. Many noted his "moderation in drinking and food, especially in the last." It was told that he, like a Mongol, eats only lamb and tea, although he could not do without good cigarettes. The enemies called him a cocain player and a drug addict, but there is no direct evidence of the use of drugs. True, one of the letters mentions opium smoking in a friendly company, of which he was a member, but a rare European in China did without such experience. There is only one argument in favor of the fact that this side of life was familiar to him: dreaming of creating the “Order of Military Buddhists” by the type of monastic orders, Ungern excluded the use of him with members of alcohol, but he allowed Hashish and opium to “give the Russian man to amuse his violent nature.”
His unpretentiousness, unrequesting, lack of interest in women are well -known, but this worldly asceticism was also a form of misanthropy - the attachment of others to earthly benefits and delights justified the attitude towards them as a lower order. “In his negligence in clothes for a sensitive mind, the proud notes of the consciousness of their superiority sounded clearly,” Knyazeva noticingly remarks. So, Napoleon at the top of power continued to wear a simple gray frock coat, not hiding, but on the contrary, emphasizing the abdomen he had covered.
Subsequently, Ungern will try to compare himself with Nicholas I and Friedrich the Great, others will find a resemblance to Pavel I in him, although he will most resemble the Swedish king Charles XII with his indomitable militancy and contempt for the joys of the flesh as the head of the Asian horse division and the dictator of Mongolia. Many Ungern-Sternbergs in the past served the Swedish crown, Dago and Revel-the former possessions of Sweden. The boy Ungern probably read a lot of books about the great commanders, the biography of the most famous of the Swedish kings, he could know from childhood and remembered that Charles XII was highly educated, but was distinguished by a manner, extreme untidiness, sloppiness in clothing, indemnity in food and absolute indifference to women. The same set of military and at the same time monastic virtues was listed behind Ungern. This does not mean that he deliberately imitated the Askte King, rather-was a similar type of personality, but some kind of memory of the original from which the copy was removed, it may have been present in it.
Ungern considered his soldiers and officers a “miserable likeness of people”, “a crowd of hungry bloodthirsty jackals scouring in search of prey”, and the intellectuals occasionally despised among them despised excessive intelligibility in the means. The inability to rise over the prejudices of modern morality was the same formidable accusation as the lack of moral principles. Ungern constantly complained that he was surrounded by not the people that he would like to see near him, but there seemed to not exist in nature. Perhaps his painful craving for occultism was also generated by the search for support outside the human circle of communication. Intimate contact with a different reality could make up for the inferiority of relations with people.
It makes no sense to contrast the cruelty of Ungern with his disinterestedness or idealism, as contemporaries did, carefully sorting his virtues and vices, laying them out on different bowls of scales in order to establish the exact ratio of good and evil in it. One here follows from the other and is associated with the most important feature of the personality of the paranoid warehouse, which, of course, was Ungern - the consciousness of his own exclusivity as an objective fact. A person of this type looks at himself as the only living surrounded by phantoms, in relation to which everything is allowed, since they are only the emanation of certain forces and began, and not the same people like himself.
Ungern’s insane energy speaks about the problems with the psyche, what people with obsessive ideas possess. This energy, sometimes superior to the measure of physical capabilities, especially amazed in combination with the asthenic addition of the baron. “Thin and exhausted, but iron health,” Wrangel remarked about him.
Everything describes its appearance almost the same, at the same time, depending on sympathy or antipathy to it, the same features will be emphasized differently. This is a tall man, dry, thin, holds very straight. He has a short trunk and long legs - “crooked”, as their ill -wishers characterize, or “cavalry”, as fans prefer to express themselves. Hands are also longer than usual, and the head is disproportionately small compared to the width of the shoulders. The hair is bright, with a reddish tint, not too thick. The same color shaggy eyebrows and rather large ("hanging") mustache. High convex forehead, regular nose. Between the narrow lips, with silently compressed, in the conversation, the upper front incisors sticking forward are visible. However, the enemy of Ungern can describe his nose as “stupid”, his hair is “rare”, call the mustache “yellow-gray”, and the teeth are “rotten, horse”.
The authors of fictionalized memories designed for a wide reader painted a portrait of the baron in accordance with the ideas about him as a demonic figure. The Kolchakovsky officer Aleshin at the first meeting with Ungern managed to notice that one of his eyes is higher than the other, that their gaze indicates “sinister madness” and “dangerous power to read people's thoughts”. Aleshin portrays a scar on his forehead, which was not striking at all as “terrible, throbbing blood with veins.”
The emigrant journalist, who saw Ungern only in the photographs, notes that such faces, "breathing ferocity and wild will," were at the Vikings, "chopped on bloody trinems." Ossentovsky, on the contrary, speaks of a person, "similar to the Byzantine icon." A calm observer finds the generic features in it: the face is “quite ordinary, with a strongly expressed Teutonism of the Ostsee type, but by no means Prussian.” He adds: “Hastings and the habit of commanding, life in a narrow -minded environment, all this laid an imprint of the soldier, although not very noticeable.”