Dmitry Olshansky. Robinsons in the land of Lilliputians

Robinsons in the land of Lilliputians
Dmitry Olshansky

Publication date: February 15, 2000

Stephen Spender. Temple. - M.: Glagol, 1999.
Evelyn Waugh. Scott-King's New Europe. - M.: Text, 1999.

“It is the inalienable right of an Englishman to live where he pleases,” said Winston Churchill. “A trip around the world is the best medicine for an Englishman,” Barrymore agreed with him. "Temple" and "New Europe..." are two completely different books about the same thing; two journeys from the depths of ideally perfect England to the vastness of the wild outside world.

The only parameter that clearly distinguishes the central characters of Waugh and Spender (who would hardly welcome any comparison with each other) is their age. Both books show heroes taken by surprise by the road - at 20 years old and at 45-50.

Stephen Spender (1909-1995) wrote The Temple in 1929, and his novel chronicles the real-life Hamburg experiences of an Oxford student. For the long-lived Spender, working on the “Temple” was “childhood in a sour hut” (B. Grebenshchikov) - a short-term youth party. The people are ready for debauchery: Stephen and his friends Wisten Hugh Auden and Christopher Isherwood, identified under transparent pseudonyms, are delighted with the pederastic freedom of the Weimar Republic. The book, written in a sort of “honest” language, stylized as a youth diary, essentially tells about the adventures of boys: a canonical genre of children's literature. If not for the heartbreaking thoughts of Spender and company about their sexual orientation, "Temple" could have claimed a place in the "Pioneer Library" - between "Honest Word" and "Vask Trubachev and his comrades." The text completely lacks any signs of the “stream of consciousness” to which Spender’s American peers William Burroughs and Paul Bowles are so committed: the heroes of “Temple” are simply sightseeing, drinking lemonade, swimming, kissing each other and saying heartfelt words, a la the oath on Sparrow Hills , monologues.

Let us note two amusing circumstances. First: visiting Germany and, in particular, Hamburg with its Ripperbahn (lovers' quarter) is a long-standing tradition of unconventionally vicious Englishmen. A new myth about Hamburg will arise 30 years after Spender; in the early 60s, the Beatles ensemble would periodically visit there, give concerts there, gradually lose their virginity, communicate with the local aesthetic public and learn from them all the worst things, that is, do exactly what Spender faithfully described.

Second: Temple was published in the late 80s; In preparing it for publication, Spender significantly edited the manuscript. The outpourings of an ardent youth are radically corrected by a trembling senile hand; Spender the Grandfather, unlike Spender the Baby, knows how the German idyll of that time ended. And therefore he moves part of the action to 1932 - so to speak, closer to the end; and therefore introduces into the characters’ dialogues the seemingly casual “Well, he’s a Jew...”.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) studied at Oxford at the same time as Spender. The story "Scott-King's New Europe" was written in 1948, at another, to put it mildly, stage of a long journey - there is no fun here. The Catholic and conservative Waugh, who hated his contemporary reality to such an extent that he finally refused on principle to use the telephone, television, car, etc., wrote something on the topic of “European holidays” that was as gloomy as it was brilliant. Like Spender, the alter ego is at the center of the story - whoever the author would like to be. Waugh's hero, like Woody Allen's, is always the same, but in this case the signature pathos reaches its apogee. Scott-King is a boring, middle-aged teacher of Greek and Latin from a closed private school, which Waugh sang all his life. From year to year, the number of boys who want to study the classics is decreasing, and the study of the work of the poet Bellorius, as unknown as Scott-King himself, draws the teacher to the continent. The plot of the story is a chronicle of Scott-King's stay in a fictional country, which Waugh endows with all the disgusting signs of European states - Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's USSR, "leftist" France and, most of all, Franco's Spain. "New Europe..." is built not so much on a geographical, but on a hagiographic principle - like the lives of saints, telling about demonic temptations. When reading, you don’t immediately notice it, because you constantly laugh.

“Received with indifference” is a fixed idea for Vo. Scott-King disdainfully rejects European temptations, which under Waugh's pen become the formal gorges of Hell, and returns to England, remaining himself. What for Spender is heaven, slightly clouded on the periphery (Nazis, who are they?), for Waugh is a reason to take a bottle of holy water out of his vest pocket. The age is not the same and the look is trained.

Travel notes are an ideological genre. If in your youth you want to escape from any island under a plausible pretext, then in your mature years it can be useful to return to the island.