Translated material
Swedish shop #18
Pavel Polyan. Not of your own free will... : History and geography of forced migrations to the USSR. - M.: OGI - Memorial, 2001. - 328 p.; circulation not specified; ISBN 5-94282-007-4.
A book about mass repression, written by a specialist in the field of economic geography: a rare case when, instead of general discussions about national politics and totalitarianism, a detailed statement of facts is offered. The greatest attention is paid to the vectors of forced migrations - where they were resettled and what results they got. The author strives to bring together all the information available in published and unpublished sources, in research of recent years.
Forced and semi-forced migrations to the USSR are rooted in pre-revolutionary practices. In this case, the first Soviet deportations of the early 20s and the “kulak exile” are considered, but most of the book is devoted, of course, to deportations associated with the Second World War - both internal (“repressed peoples”) and “international migrations”; The issue of repatriation of Soviet citizens, as well as the deportation of Germans to work in the USSR, is covered in detail, however, the first stage of such migration, from east to west (deportation from occupied territories), remains behind the scenes - in 1996, the author, however, published a monograph on this subject "Victims of two dictatorships." Separately, the issue of rehabilitation is considered, that is, in this case, the return of repressed peoples in the 50s to the places of their former residence: the roots of many modern “ethnic” conflicts are precisely in these movements and redrawing of borders. The appendix provides a chronology of all government acts on deportations and an extensive bibliography. In general, the main emphasis is not on personal testimony, but on statistics, legislative materials and ministerial documentation.
In conclusion, Pavel Polyan concludes that forced migration is purely economically unprofitable - unprofitable for the state as a whole; in his opinion, one can only talk about a certain departmental benefit for the NKVD as the largest economic unit in the country.
Quote: The call to “take part in the restoration of Crimean health resorts” sounded in Soviet propaganda immediately after the liberation of Crimea from occupation. The deportation of the Crimean Tatars, Greeks, Bulgarians and Armenians filled it with genuine national economic meaning. Already in September-October 1944, more than 17 thousand families of collective farmers, mainly from Ukraine, arrived there. However, livestock farming, viticulture, tobacco growing, and other types of farming in the Crimea, which was blessed by the Tatars, required skills that the settlers did not have. In the spring of 1945, the situation of approximately 65 thousand new residents of Crimea became critical and caused a powerful outflow of immigrants from Crimea: thus, by April 1946 (despite the decree on the undisputed collection of all loans and credits from the “returners”) 11,381 families left Crimea, while only one thousand families moved in. By July 1, 1948, 52.5% of the families brought to it since 1944 had left Crimea. This or something like this happened in other cases when an economic vacuum was formed in the area of settlement of a large or small ethnic group due to its sudden deportation. And it is no coincidence that, according to the military-industrial complex at the beginning of 1950, it was in the Saratov and Crimean regions. the greatest mechanical outflow of the population was recorded.
F.B. Uspensky. Name and power: Name choice as an element of dynastic struggle in medieval Scandinavia. - M.: Languages of Russian culture, 2001 (Studia philologica. Series minor). - 160 s.; circulation 1000 copies; ISBN 7859-0208-7.
Everyone knows that certain names at different times were considered good or bad, successful and unsuccessful. Royal names are a special matter. Each country has its own list of royal names, and the name of the heir to the throne is chosen especially carefully. The heir, of course, must be a legitimate one - but, as it turns out, this rule did not apply everywhere and not always. The book by Fyodor Uspensky is dedicated to bastards - the illegitimate sons of Norwegian kings or people who declared themselves such.
Before the adoption of Christianity in Scandinavia, the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate were blurred - children from a slave were the lowest, but they, at the request of the father, could be recognized as heirs. Christianity, brought to Norway by Olav the Saint, was supposed to change everything - however, traditions are very tenacious, and the situation in which the position of a bastard could be equivalent (if not preferable) to the position of a legitimate heir lasted some measly two or three hundred years. Here it was important to choose the right name - at birth or at the moment when the impostor begins to lay claim to power. The legitimate sons of the kings continued to receive clan, pagan names, while the bastards, with some bashfulness, were given second-rate, foreign names - that is, in this case, Christian. But since the son of Olaf the Saint, King Magnus the Good, was a bastard, the name Magnus suddenly turned into a banner for anyone who wanted to take the royal throne that did not rightfully belong to him.
The author examines the vicissitudes of the dynastic struggle in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, the changing connotations of various names, appeals - over the heads of real ancestors - to legendary rulers, renunciation of the father, taking the name of the mother in order to pass oneself off as a bastard son, and other tricks, on which anyone who thirsts for power is ready to go to. The Church - and in theory it was supposed to support only children from legal marriages - also sometimes entered into the political game. When giving names to his sons, a representative of the royal family had to think about what fate he was thereby defining for them - the ambiguity of a Christian name could both emphasize the shame and give hope for the future.
Quote: For Svein Astridsson, the figure of Magnus Olavsson was one of the most significant in his political biography. It was from him that he was forced to challenge power over the Danish state from 1043, and it was from him that he received this power in 1047. Later, having already become the king of Denmark, he tried to gain Norway - what Magnus the Good had once taken from the Danes. By becoming Magnus, Svein, as it were, declares himself as the rightful ruler of Denmark and the potential ruler of Norway. It is characteristic that Svein Astridsson imitates the bastard Magnus the Good and competes with the bastard Magnus Haraldsson. By taking the name Magnus and using his mother’s name for a patronym, he seems to become the same illegitimate son of the king as they are. Using the mask of a bastard, Svein-Magnus achieved the desired results - he managed to secure the Danish throne for his branch of the family.
Robert Favtier. Capetians and France: The role of the dynasty in the creation of the state / Transl. with fp. G.F. Tsibulko. - St. Petersburg: Eurasia, 2001 (Clio series). - 320 s.; circulation 3000 copies; ISBN 5-8071-0071-9.
Another translated monograph on medieval European history, published by the Eurasia publishing house in the Clio series. Unfortunately, not enough information about the author is given; it is only clear that Robert Favtier (1885-1966) is a recognized specialist, that the book was written during the Second World War and is intended for the general reader - for those who, in the face of defeat, will “draw from it the same confidence in the destinies of our country . ” “I wrote this book not only with love, but also with calmness. I did not deal with foreign policy issues at all. I was not afraid that my patriotism would affect my manner of presenting the facts ,” Favtier emphasizes. The style of presentation chosen is soft, careful, not too personal, but not dispassionate - almost a family story. How the Capet family worked, gradually attracting lands, money, people, gradually turning their small domain into a state, and, at first, outside lords, peasants and burghers - into their subjects, who saw the king as a protector. By the end of the Capetian rule, Favtier believes, there is no nation yet, but the foundation for its emergence has been laid. Don’t want everything at once, hurry up slowly - and you will achieve, if not power, then the gratitude of your descendants.
The publishers provided the book with the necessary notes, bibliography, maps and dynastic tables.
Quote: The enrichment of the burgher class... evokes in the nobility a feeling of envy, a desire not to be inferior to them in appearance and way of life; a feeling, a later echo of which we find in the lamentations of Queen Joan of Navarre, wife of Philip the Fair, at the sight of the rich attire of Flemish townswomen during her entry into the city. The nobles, wanting to show off, go bankrupt, and gradually this game, which becomes more and more difficult for incomes that remain unchanged, ends with the mortgaging of land and an even greater decrease in income. This impoverished nobility, partially tied to the land, isolated from the other classes of the nation, has only one resource left - service to the king. From the middle of the 13th century. More and more, the French nobility finds means of living in the royal service, sometimes even enriches itself, exercising the power delegated to it, which, due to its financial situation and the transformation of other social classes, it no longer possesses.
Michelle Tournier. Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar: A Novel / Trans. from fr. Yu.Ya.Yakhnina. - St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2001 (series “New Age”). - 315 pp.; circulation 5000 copies; ISBN 5-94278-062-5.
Quote: The legend of the fourth sorcerer, who came from more distant lands than the others, was late in Bethlehem and wandered until Good Friday, was told repeatedly, in particular by the American pastor Henry L. Van Dyke (1852-1933) and the German Eduard Schaper (b. . in 1908), who was inspired by a Russian Orthodox legend.
“I am by no means one of the sexually preoccupied ,” the donkey eyewitness tells us from page 182 of Michel Tournier’s novel. And then, in magnificent Russian, with an elusive but distinct donkey accent (the work of the translator Yuliana Yakhnina is filigree, and in the final part, “Taor,” a real miracle of delayed inspiration), he sets out how the Nativity of Christ actually took place.
It will not be possible to retell the stories of the three wise men, whose names are on the cover; in addition, one would have to call them not sorcerers, but maguses, as is customary among titled experts in foreign literature. Each of them (not experts, of course, but maguses), according to Tournier, set out on a journey for purely personal, far from evangelical reasons: the outcome of the journey is always polar to the first step of the journey. At the last moment, the evil King Herod informed them about Christmas, for whom it was a sin to pray. What happened next, of course, you know. Let's move on to Magus #4. His caravan moved too crookedly and was late in Bethlehem.
Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar sedately tell the reader about the grace that the infant messiah bestowed upon them. And the Indian prince Taor hesitates and shudders, as if he were a non-party member at an open meeting: it’s funny - he swam to the ends of the world for the recipe for lahat delight. Pistachio, really. I loved sweets. I perceived reality from a gastronomic point of view.
Let's not lie. It was the womb, and not intuition, that fluttered in little Taore: hey, hey, it seems that this wonderful child will be able to feed you what you cannot get from other hands. The prince rushes to Bethlehem - but babies are already being beaten there. Do you happen to know where the Holy Family fled? Yes, sort of to the south.
South. The further south you go, the more glass crunches under the sole: grass, wood, stone, the earth itself are steadily dressed, replaced by salt. This is the Dead Sea approaching and on its shore the city of Sodom, populated by anti-people, is pressed into the anti-space by God’s heel.
A kilometer away from him, Lot's wife still towers - a vortex-pillar twisted for millennia by an accidental turn of the head. Doesn't she seem to be the least of the losses? Here it is larger, and the sodomites annually decorate its shimmering idol with garlands of anchards, and swill gin from the throat, and machine-gun copulate before the cold, eternal gesture of the wife of a traitor to the motherland. They copulate in their own way, in a sodomite way: their women prefer not to get pregnant.
At the core of the NaCl crystal, Taora's sweet tooth experienced an inexplicable sense of sacrifice in the name of pistachio Turkish delight; the prince cleverly buried himself in the core of the core: in the salt mines of Sodom. For 33 years.
It's not even hell. This is hell to the eighteenth degree. The bed, the wall, the bowl, the air, day after day, peel off your skin, and you become crimson-blue, like a flayed bull. To live means to work hard. If you fall in love, you will instantly die from overexertion. If you blink, you will wince in pain. Lightning of pain: in the corner a new guy is crumbling a loaf of bread about some earthly prophet; Blessed are those who hunger, for they...
They will be satisfied; believe, fear, ask. The underworld will open, and you will wander along the deserted cracks sideways, into the distance, holding on only to the question: where is he? where is he now? Any movement makes you faint, the wind stings the gnawed alveoli, where? Street, door, stairs, door again; They had dinner here at thirteen, but I was late again, they just left, crumbs, puddles. Bread, wine.
When you, like a dog, lick the tabletop clean, you will suddenly be grabbed by the elbows and pulled into the heavens. No one will explain why: you, Taor, were the first of the people to partake of the Holy Mysteries - you did it even before His crucifixion. And now you're dead. The clicking, rustling, tickling of angel wings all around. Body. Blood.
The third chronologically - and the best in Hamburg - novel by Michel Tournier (b. 1924), translated by Yuliana Yakhnina, was first published by the Moscow publishing house "Rainbow" in the mid-90s. That paperback book was a bibliographic rarity a long time ago.
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