Preychin and Berkovsky

In St. Petersburg, Zvezda magazine, a complete collected works and letters of Leonid Ivanovich Prebychin was released. This is a carefully done, scientific dignity work. The necessary foundation has been laid down for the study of a wonderful writer, finally recognized as one of the classics of Russian literature of the twentieth century. I would put him in a row with Platonov and Zoshchenko - not stylistically, but thematically. When the prey began to reissue into perestroika, they wrote about him that he exposes Nepov’s philistinism, the same thing that the goodness spoke about Zoshchenko. In fact, all three are united by the picture of decreasing, converging by their Russian life: ontological impoverishment, the place of empty, the abomination of Soviet desolation. Only Zoshchenko is noisy - a communal apartment, and the prey must be quiet, because its provincial inhabitants live in their own collapsing houses. “And quietly, so, Lord, it’s quiet that you can hear time,” Akhmatova wrote in a poem about Paris under the Germans. This poem begins with the words: “When they burden the era ...” So preychin buried the era of Russian life. Moreover, he, this era, is taken in her pre -Soviet sources. The novel "City En" was written about this. There is the same, but the pre -revolutionary province. It is difficult to catch the difference. Household is clearly richer, but the author’s vision is the same. Pretychin is a writer in general ironic, his eye is rather angry. But he is angry and compassionate at the same time.

Benjamin Kaverin wrote about the booty in the memoirs "Epilogue":

His spiritual wealth was firmly, painfully, forever hidden under the seven seals of irony, sometimes breaking through an unusually well -aimed nickname, joke, caricature. However, he did not want to offend anyone. He was evil, hopelessly, hopelessly kind.

This, I repeat, memoirs written forty years after the death of the prey, who committed suicide in 1936. But what the literary contemporary said in the discussion of creativity prey in the same 36th year, which, in the general opinion, just contributed to his suicide. This is Naum Berkovsky, a significant figure, a person who possessed a well -deserved reputation of a major specialist in Western literature, the author of a number of research in this field, which other than brilliant ones can not be called. Starting by the fact that the book “City of En” has “Death Profile”, Berkovsky continued:

Bad qualities of prey begins primarily with his topic. He writes about the province, about the city of Dvinsk around 1905. The prey is depicted in such a way that the boys went to classes, the priests served prayers, the ladies bought hats, husbands earned money, and now, by the way, riots took place.

Pretychin is such a writer who either missed everything that has happened over the past nineteen years in the history of our country, or pretends to be missing.

The thing is that he has a topic, the content does not work. They were donated to him, he received them as a gift from the old literary tradition, and he has no choice but to formalize this presented material. Of course, in no extent the preychin is an innovator, this is a stylizer.

Both are right - both Kaverin and Berkovsky. The latter is in almost everything except the statement of stylization. Pretychin - a writer with an undoubtedly his own, sharp manner, he has developed a personal style. The ill -wishers who criticized him for formalism - this was the main sin in the Soviet year of the 36th year, tried to mention Joyce, the book of his stories "Dubliners". But she was released in the first translation in the 27th year, and Pretychin began to be published in the 24th, and already in an independent manner. Yes, and Joyce was not in Dublins no formalist, this is not a game Ulysses. The longest and most famous story in Dublins - Dead - is generally traditional, if you like, old -fashioned.

But you can’t call an old -fashioned prey. The teachers among the classics, of course, had, the most noticeable - Chekhov (which, by the way, is similar to Joyce in Dublins), but the prey of his skill. The main feature of the preychinsky style, its main technique is minimalism. So to speak, minimalism brought to the maximum. Poets know that writing in short lines is much more difficult than long. Write, so to speak, without adjectives. In the preychinsky prose there is one feature that indicates another secret teacher of it: put the subject in first place in short sentences; It was not “snowing”, but “snowing”. This leads to Pushkin-prose, to his Gal-Latin brevity, grammativity. Here is a technique: a description of deaf life is, as it were, in gymnasium Latin. It does not arise so sharp, but nevertheless a noticeable contrast, he feels this game. The topic of preychinskaya then, it turns out, is a comparison of culture and life, and it is not exposed to be exposed, as you might think, and the culture is domesticated. Equal, some plush bombs on curtains and, say, Nietzsche are equalized. Culture, cultural myth are reduced to everyday life, and then the philistine apartment appears in the prey museum. This is a museum of the nineteenth century, when it turns out that Nietzsche is not so much a philosopher and his book, but a certain picture that some of the acquaintances of the narrator are similar: a sign of similarity is a hairstyle with a end and a wide mustache.

Here is an example of the conversations of the storyteller’s mother, called Maman everywhere. The war began with Japan, and Maman tells the acquaintance of the nurse leaving for the war: "Watch them, and then our tea will be cheaper."

Then, when the Japanese won, the same topic takes on the option:

“We need to eat more rice,” Maman said now at dinner, “and then you will be strong.” The Japanese eat one rice - and see how they win us.

Or:

Kondratyeva, jumping up from the rocking, ran to us. We praised the kindergarten and ascended with her on the veranda. There I saw a book with inscriptions in the fields - "as for whom!" - It was written by a chemical pencil and moistened. - "Wow!" “So he said,” Maman read the title, “Zarathustra.” “This is my husband and makes his notes,” Kondratyeva told us. Andrei came and showed me a snake on which Eduard UII was glued in a Scottish skirt.

This is not the exposure of philistinism, it is nostalgia - and very subtle prose, a sort of Marcel Proust - no less, but in its own way skillful, laconic. And one more thing: this is the world through the eyes of a child leaving the apartment no further than his real school or city provincial park. And the city is not even provincial, but the county - but with a raid of some Europeanism: Dvinsk, now Daugavpils, and these county Russian Germans and Poles also work on the same image of the domesticated world. Europe is not Goethe and Kant, but the maintener of the sausage Madame Strauss, who was accidentally killed by a ham that fell on her, and her lover, Kaplmaster Schmidt, walking behind a coffin in the back rows of the procession, because he is not a relative and people observe decency.

The world is prose, but the prose of culture.

The motivation for the age-related storyteller creates a lot of subtle effects in the "En". The church is given, as in the Tolstoy's "Resurrection": "Rays stretched from the windows, the dust was spinning on them. The time crawled barely. Finally Golovnev went out with a kettle from the altar and went for boiling water for the sacrament." But the child is not as simple as it seems, or rather, he becomes more complicated as the narrative. This is a novel about the formation of critical consciousness in the minds of infancy-conformist: after all, children are always conformists. The storyteller likes everything: both the book about Mowgli and the angel in the picture, but most of all he likes Chichikov with Manilov and their friendship.

I shook a hand in Serge: - You and I are like Manilov and Chichikov. - He did not read about them. I told him how they made friends and how they wanted to live together and together to engage in science. Serzh opened the closet and took out his books. “Here is Don Quixote,” Serge showed me, “he was a fool.”

The En City describes the main plot of life in the prey - its quiet riot against the canon and norm. We can say - a Christian riot. Pretychin is essentially a Christian figure, and the Christian myth acquires the same everyday features of a mid -bourgeois childhood:

On Saturday, before Easter, when the Easter cakes were already in the oven and baked, Maman closed with me in the bedroom and, sitting on the bed, read the gospel for me. "Favorite Student" was especially interested in me. I imagined it in a coat with gold buttons, whistling and with a recruitment in my hand.

The beloved disciple of Christ is John, who was attended on the Persia of the teacher. The whole plot of the novel is the hero’s search by such a beloved student, although it seems to him that he is in love with the girl Tusya, renamed Naliei. In the novel, the motive of the hero’s weak eyes was very skilled, when almost on the last page it turns out that he is a blizor: wearing glasses, he saw the world differently. The last words of the novel:

In the evening, when it became dark, I saw that there were a lot of stars and that they have rays. I began to think that before that I saw everything I saw wrong. I would be interested to see Natalie now and find out what she was. But Natalie was far away. She spent summer this year in Odessa.

Some believe that this ending is ironic, ambiguous: star rays are the light of long -extinguished stars, and Natalie, what he saw properly, will most likely appear the same banging rag from Sologub. Tusya will be, not Natalie. But I would not call the "city of en" a variation on the topic "" Darkness of Low Truths, we are more expensive for us as a rise to deception. " The city of En is not the city that the narrative is about, but not the best world, and not the myth of the best world, it is an alternative being, which appears - literature. This is a novel about the formation of a writer, a portrait of an artist in his youth, and here there really is a resemblance to Joyce.

When the prey was worked out in March of the 36th year, it was exclusively about the novel "City En" - the then novelty. The Pretychinsky stories of the Soviet cycle were not mentioned, and from there it would be possible, not even straining, to extract an anti -Soviet satire, which often took place in the then literature under the brand of exposure of philistinism. Meanwhile, there is no satires of the booty - there is no - there is a very subtle intake of admiring and pity under the guise, as it were, mockery. Irony and pity, according to a well -known recipe. Here he followed the advice and practice of Chekhov, who wrote that, wanting to emotionally take possession of the reader, there was no need to try to pierce him, describing the grief, there is no need to cry himself. When the preychin writes: “Chigildeeva’s headquarters lived above us in a mesonin, and at the end of winter we met her to ride the same cabin in the cemetery,” this is not an indication of stinginess, but the poverty of two women who lost their husbands, but trying not to sink, do everything as it should. For the real reader, it is precisely such phrases that can cause a tear. The only difference between Soviet stories is the prey and the city of the En En that noble poverty in the first requires even greater effort and does not always manage to preserve the nobility.

A modern critic, discussing the problem of satire in the booty, writes:

The routine in it (prose prey) depicts human existence in itself, and the revolution even more than everyday life exposes the unshakable pattern of human reactions and motives of behavior, the nobody of the mind without transforming ... the brighter the household keyboard of preychinsky plots, the more carefully we have to talk about any historical shifts captured in them, about the revealing or revealing or revealing or revealing or exposure. satirical intentions of the writer.

And the same critic is very important (this is Andrei Aryev):

... "Province" L. Prebychin already has a "model of the world", no less representative in an artistic sense than any other. Not because the "light of the world" comes from it. But because the world itself is ontologically, essentially "provincial" ... "City En" is a hyperprovincial insight of Russian prose of the twentieth century ... Man is a "tradesman" and "sounds proudly."

As stated in one old Russian novel: the right thought, my thought. Question: Why couldn't this with a high -cultural person who had also a serious philosophical culture, a connoisseur of all sorts of dark Germans, N. Ya. Berkovsky? This is the genuine and standing discussion, the plot associated with prey: the prey himself is now indisputable.

Undoubtedly, Berkovsky’s speech against the prey was a serious ethical mistake, especially since, according to Kaverin, no one would act and forced him. It turns out that Berkovsky was confident in his innocence, but he did not think about the consequences of his speech for the prey - because he did not want to think about the bad.

It seems that Berkovsky was a man of fighting temperament. He had little academic activity, to which he went through serious training in graduate school with Zhirmunsky. He was in the twenties a very active literary critic, his then articles were collected in the book “Current Literature”. This, undoubtedly, is a significant book, a brilliant demonstration of a brilliant author's gift. This subtle intellectual was a faithful Rappovts - it was precisely by temperament, and not in intellect. In the last attitude, he was immeasurably higher than his associates, claiming the role of the organizers of the literary process and conducting the Marxist-Proletarian line in it.

Berkovsky was distinguished by addiction to strong expressions; For example, he insulted Kaverin for the whole life, saying about his novel “Scandalist”: each era leaves its litter in literary works, now this droppen has collected Kaverin. At the same time, he rather praised the romance. Or is he spoke about the then star Leonid Leonov in connection with the sensational novel "Thief" - Leonovsky talent in every possible way:

The public, hygiene and aesthetics all together require - to grind a literary wardrobe, you need a woman Gorpyn to betray the old Dovgochun pants under clean air. ... Therefore, we will be harsh to Leonov, we must seduce him from the dead path that he was trampled into ... The rag morgue - this is the sign for our novels suffering from poverty of the material, which have those who have faded from our "remarkable", as Bukharin said.

Vintage piece, precious hemma of the twenties. Berkovsky’s rudeness is stylized, this is a technique, imitation of a dental style of the different so -called Marxist criticism. A boy from an intelligent family, having erased excellent studies and approximate behavior, imitates the yard hooligans: a well -known complex. At the same time, the idea of a cited article (it was called the “struggle for prose”) is significant: Soviet prose should not focus on household material and plot techniques of old literature. Here, Berkovsky is ready to agree with Lef's theorists, sees partial truth in their attitude to the fact, that is, to the new material of the new revolutionary reality. It is necessary to throw out the "carrion" - another strong and impressive expression. Leph's mistake - they want to write with a plow and plow with a pen. Literature cannot be deprived of the right to aesthetic transformation of its subject. Question: how to do this in the new conditions of communist construction - so that it would be communist and artistically. And Berkovsky makes truly tremendous efforts, trying to find the appropriate method and techniques for teaching him aver, but his business often comes down to the alphabet. It is not difficult, but rather funny to observe how this esthetes notes the stylistic mistakes of some kind of mandrine or tries to find the evolutionary perspective in the literary helpless Furmanovsky "Chapaeva". The barren efforts of love, in some way. But now he discovers his genuine love. His article "On Mandelstam prose" is no doubt a critical classic.

If the Pasternak in his prose of the poet is looking for a thing to a cultural expression, even to the word, then Mandelstam, on the contrary, is looking for people and objects, even everyday, a cultural nest, gives their historical and cultural projection, they are highly representative, raised over everyday life. The corresponding tests of Berkovsky are stunning (for example, about the "coin" by Mandelstamov phrases), to read this text - genuine pleasure. Conclusion (I give it not strictly quote):

"The style of Mandelstam serves that the thing is seen by her" surname "..." by generic "perception, almost all things in the" Egyptian brand "are taken ... The Parkin summarizes the classic rampant of the 19th century ..." You need to take "living people" not in life, but from a height of cultural problems. Mandelstam teaches the historiosophical of life ... "The refraction of life with culture, the central principle of Mandelstam's prose, now, during the discussion of the cultural revolution, is immensely expensive." The same principle is shown in Olesha's "envy". Olesha’s “historiosophical” has two everyday life - inveterate and Soviet. Olesha can also perceive Soviet life as leaking in history. "

Berkovsky would know where the Soviet new life will be leaking in history!

At this parade of erudition (remembers already Reme de Gurmon) there is also verbal skill - inverse life, for example, that means the buried and at the same time hopeless, missing. The rudeness of Berkovsky is by no means Rappovshchina, but also a subtle game with allusions. For example: "Bethlehem master of aphorisms": here is not blasphemy, but another exhibition of erudition, sort of like "Dutch master of winter landscapes"; The author is his person in the Hermitage. These are trifles to the characterization of the then, twenties of Berkovsky.

Интересно развернуто про Олешу: советизм и светлое будущее Андрея Бабичева в том, что солнце у него блестит на металлических пластинках подтяжек, а отпетый поэт Кавалеров не вылезает из пыльной берлоги старой романтической культуры. Эта культура сейчас - Анечка Прокопович.

Спрашивается: зачем этот эрудит связался именно с РАППом? Какой черт понес его на эту галеру? Ему бы самое место на правом фланге ЛЕФа - там, где Шкловский. Да вот в том-то и дело, что это место было уже занято. В подмастерьях у Шкловского Берковскому ходить не хотелось, а в РАППе он выделялся. Задирался: формалисты устарели, это Вяземский и Шевырев, а РАПП - коллективный Белинский. Таким Белинским - то есть первым, передовым и влиятельнейшим критиком - хотел Берковский самого себя видеть, и напрасно: он лучше Белинского.

Очень в пользу Берковского говорит, что он не вступил в партию.

Почему же, еще раз, он так неудачно выступил против Добычина? Помимо всякой морали - почему так эстетически да и культурно-исторически неправильно выступил?

Сказался испуг провинциала, выросшего в Вильне. Это не Двинск, конечно, но и не авангардная столица. Берковский испугался того, что Добычин зовет обратно, что не будет новой культуры и ему места в ней. Солнце Андрея Бабичева заходило и уже не блестело на его подтяжках. На подтяжках впору было вешаться. Замечательная жизнь, о которой говорил Бухарин, оборачивалась чем-то иным. Берковский с Добычиным боролся не за правое дело, а за призрак его. Выпад против Добычина был попыткой экзорцизма, заклятия, чур меня. Запахло возвращением в старое гетто культуры. Дворовые хулиганы слишком уж разошлись, а мальчику-отличнику так не хотелось возвращаться от их завлекательных веселий к пухлым томам, к немецкой грамматике.

Ему еще сильно повезло, что это возвращение удалось.

Уйдя насовсем к Гофману и Тику с Вакенродером, Берковский признал правоту Кавалерова, предававшегося западноевропейским грезам. Понял ли он в конце концов правоту Добычина? что "историософская перспектива" - за вечным бытом, за мещанством, за Анечкой Прокопович? Мы - поняли. Мы будем спать с Анечкой.