Nikolai Nikiforov. The Sage, the Maiden and the Shameless Publishers

In the United States of America in the 1830s-60s there was an American Renaissance (apparently, it died out with the Civil War). The giant of this revival is Ralph Waldo Emerson. Our earth was born almost yesterday, said Emerson, history is an almost empty sheet - let's look overseas, read their books (but not in dusty libraries, a person deserves not to have the dust of libraries fall on him), let's look into our hearts, learn good manners - and the forests will bow at the sight of our virtues, the soil will be rich and abundant, arts and science will bring us closer to solving those mysteries that have not been revealed for millennia: Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log - What do I know sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? In a world full of mysteries, there is always room for human creativity, and since Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us, etc (which Browning said on a slightly different occasion), since each of us happens to experience moments of a noble state of mind, then.. .(?). Of course, in knowledge of literature and poetry and love for them, not a single figure of Russian culture could compete with Emerson, and in terms of maturity and accuracy of language he has very few competitors in his century (which, for example, was said by Nietzsche, who included him in number of the four best prose authors of the 19th century).

Sage of Concord (this is the nickname this husband received) raised his voice, proclaimed the need for a national bard - Walt Whitman, a journalist and editor of sad newspapers, already over 30, heard the call, his soul began to boil (the quote is almost literal), he was transformed into a national bard , Emerson immediately recognized this, several decades later others recognized it, the bard’s voice rang over the planet, and this voice was heard: Borges, who worked in the library, in the quiet corners of which rapes sometimes happened, Henry Miller, who was dying of hunger in the mud of pre-war Paris, Pablo Neruda, persecuted by the imperialists, countless crowds of oppressed peasants and workers of different nations. Mandelstam, it seems, said that Whitman “came out of somewhere.” Whitman did not emerge from somewhere at all and, before emerging, was washed by the most diverse waters of history, into which Mandelstam himself never descended. (Vl. Solovyov does not look at all next to Emerson; it is enough to compare the hopeless vulgarity of the former’s poems with the subtlety and depth of the latter, whose poems, by the way, were closer to the aesthetics of metaphysical poets than any other poetry of that time.) However, about Walt Whitman It’s better to speak to those who can hear his voice (I can’t hear him).

Emerson's philosophy was philosophy in the very sense in which Bergson later defined it, that is, a practice associated with intuition and not striving for final truth, since final truths lead only to the crematorium. The main theme for him has always been man, his creativity and his dying. Every word, every gesture, every building, every state institution - everything is caused by one, human reason, and loses its meaning in the eyes of descendants, too, always for the same reasons. All times are essentially the same and differ only in the ratio of the amount of creative and automatic activity. All objects of the world are the application of the same force, and to draw, for example, some intellectual conclusions from this (that is, to say, like Schopenhauer: I will take such and such a position in relation to this world) means to show vanity and secondary character. existence. All that is interesting in a person is his will; to pay attention to some of his other properties is meanness towards him.

Borges (who often mentions Emerson in general) wrote that he, unlike Carlyle, does not put great people above humanity, but, on the contrary, believes that all their merits only confirm what is present in any person. I won’t give an exact quote, but Borges especially liked that the depth (?) of Shakespeare confirms his (Borges’) depth. It may be pleasant for someone sitting in a big meaningless library to compare himself with Shakespeare, but it is obvious that, being Shakespeare, Shakespeare is not interesting - he is interesting for what he was not, that is, for the power that cut the stones of words, and not at all for what came out of these stones. According to Emerson, any person can be remarkable only because it points to a certain possibility of general integrity, and not at all by the illusion of integrity that a weak mind can see in any particular physical person.

Emerson convincingly argues that there is nothing uninteresting in history and art; Accordingly, everything that prevents a person from realizing his connection with the whole of history, any science that breaks time into separate segments, suffers from limitations that an honest person must escape. Thus, an honest look at history, that is, not spoiled by the carrion of random words, will give a person the opportunity to live in the present “now,” which, obviously, is no worse than all the other “nows” that have ever happened. But here he is, of course, inconsistent, since he was actually afraid of history, like his entire age. An honest treatment of history requires the utmost precision and disinterest. But, no matter what Emerson declared, history for him was an object and instrument of manipulation. A little blurring here, adding a little sublimity there, removing obscenities - all forgivable little things. He never solved the main problem - the “present time”. His texts are full of the roar of ideas and possibilities collected from all centuries, a roar that in Whitman himself became monstrous, but he did not and could not find a point of contact between the times; the reason for this was later called “Emersonian optimism.” There was no such worthy thing that Emerson would not glance at, but he was unable to stop his gaze on anything.

In fact, the entire nineteenth century suffered from the same thing: it was full of worthy gentlemen, capable of generating an infinite number of elegant things and texts, but incapable of any responsibility. Thoughts became increasingly lofty, living space became increasingly narrower. The same vice is visible in the example of the English Pre-Raphaelites. From a speculative point of view, their revival was infinitely beautiful, but it was precisely the overdeveloped habit of speculation that taught them to paint so many painful and stillborn “painted paradises on the wall.” Hence Beardsley comes after Burne-Jones, and hence Wilde. The latter had the symbolic role of paying for all the delights of the nineteenth century, and he paid, it must be said, not in the best coin, that is, of course, he honestly laid out everything he had, but his reserves turned out to be modest. “Looking into the face of death, I understood important things...” Wilde writes in De Profundis. “I understood this, this and this...” he writes, and, having for a moment acquired clarity, accuracy and persuasiveness, his prose soon again it becomes helpless, perfumed and full of commonplaces, among which there are many sayings of Emerson.

Later, however, Emerson's style received remarkable development from Bernard Shaw. He, as Borges noted, incredibly developed English rhetoric, and this development was due to terrible ideological insanity and irresponsibility.

Yes, I forgot to add, there is also this peculiarity: there are several Emersons: front, secret, completely secret, etc. Something like Nietzsche and his diaries. However, the secret Nietzsche seems to look worse than the front one, but with Emerson, they say, the situation is the opposite.

But all this was a long time ago. With some shame I have to admit that everything written above is more “thoughts on the subject” than a review. The book under review is something much more complex than just “the writings of the philosopher Emerson.” Maybe it’s even more interesting, although I would still like to see “the works of the philosopher Emerson” in Russian first, and only then such mysterious texts. There is a special type of hero in Russian literature, best of all, it seems, developed by Chekhov. These are girls who experience a “longing for the light.” If you look at it abstractly, the idea of ​​these “aspiring girls” is not so terrible. But once you see these girls in action, you immediately understand what you could have guessed long ago: Russian literature is completely inhuman. People who are ready to read texts about “solar aspiration” can be subjected to any test, and they will survive.

In short, the book consists of transcriptions of “Emerson’s teachings” made by some mysterious bright soul (the publication does not contain any indication of her name) back in the last century. The bright soul took the collections Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series and translated her favorites from them, that is, what she understood. In addition, the soul translated Representative Men, because with great people everything is clear to everyone. Soul wrote in Russian with difficulty, transcribed English names in a funny way (the Englishman Alexander Pope was a good poet), often distorted the meaning and published everything that seemed difficult to her (up to half of the text). One can even assume that what she produced was not too difficult , but simply not fully illuminated by the light of wisdom . The text is an interesting document from a historical point of view; perhaps researchers will get to it, especially the refractions of American wisdom I won't go into detail. The only question is: isn't this book a historical document of our time ?

The book was published by the publishing houses "AST" and "Harvest"; the latter is known for a large series of thick philosophical books with golden spines. It was probably possible to assume such a possibility before, but now there is confidence: this company produces rotten herring. Personally, I, who recently spent almost a week reading “Creative Evolution” published by Harvest for almost a week, am scared to think what kind of poison this publishing house could have slipped in. The observed flourishing of book publishing in general hardly makes it possible to suspect the possibility of some kind of positive cultural movement (what kind of cultural movement is it possible to talk about when in “Results” the poet Gandlevsky seriously writes texts that Mozart, it turns out, is a genius, and that the brilliant poet felt this ingeniously Pushkin, and on the Internet the largest columnist Max Fry , seems to be really sure that he is fulfilling some important mission, and no one seems to have pointed out his nudity), but does anyone really understand how “wells” are poisoned speech"? Is anyone interested in this? In general, in reviews of translated books, you often come across comments that “the book was translated, of course, not into Russian.” Mentioning this requires good manners. But no one shows much concern. Perhaps this particular case is not a reason to worry: just looking at the cover of the book under review is not enough to be sure of the quality of the text. But here the situation is like in the movie "The Matrix". One detail is enough to forever stop believing that your world is reality. You begin to remember: you also saw Eliot’s “Crime in the Cathedral” in “ABC-Classics” translated by Toporov, and almost everyone knows what this trade mark means - can you trust “ABC-Classics”? Suspicion falls on everyone at once, and you think: is it even possible to read any translated books in Russian? I would really like clarity, some kind of separation of the seeds from the chaff.

But the unknown girl still has a bright memory - what do we know about her? The man seems to be good.