Translated material
Swedish shop #27
Decembrist uprising: Documents. Volume XIX. Cases of the Supreme Criminal Court and the Investigative Commission. - M.: Russian Political Encyclopedia (ROSSPEN), 2001. - 528 p.; circulation 1000 copies; ISBN 5-8243-0147-6.
ROSSPEN continues the unique publication of all materials available in the archives of the investigative cases of the Decembrists, which was once begun under the auspices of the Nauka publishing house. This volume includes the cases of those members of the Southern Society and the Society of United Slavs who were not brought to the Supreme Criminal Court - not all of them were released from punishment, some were tried by local military courts or their fate was decided simply by a royal resolution. Collected here are mainly the testimonies of those who did not become widely known in connection with the uprising, those who were recently accepted, or who had only heard about the society but did not join. They are the ones who talk about Pestel, Bestuzhev-Ryumin, Muravyov; From their answers one can get some idea of the way of thinking and the daily life of the “rank-and-file” army officer. The readiness to tell the investigation everything, down to the smallest details of the conversation, which is certainly not necessary to share, is usually striking. At the same time, the feeling is that, it seems, no one ever does anything mean on purpose, runs ahead of the locomotive, or reports “just in case.” Also remarkable is the difference - and in a sense, on the contrary, the similarity - between the behavior of master and servant, officer and private - the nobles lay out everything that their sovereign, their overlord, asks about; Pestel's orderly, interrogated on the subject of discovering the master's papers, locks himself in until the last minute - remaining faithful to his overlord.
From the testimony of the cavalry artillery company # 5 of Lieutenant Nashchokin: Upon our arrival at Lieutenant Colonel Muravyov’s booth, they found Colonels Tizenhausen, Vranitsky and Shveikovsky, Second Lieutenant Vedenyapin and several other officers who were sitting in the distance, and the conversation I started with Colonels Shveikovsky and Tizenhausen, as well like the darkness in the booth, in which one candle was burning, prevented me from distinguishing them, even what type of service they were; in continuation of our conversation, Bestuzhev, without addressing them, said what exactly, I don’t know, in French with Vranitsky and Sergei Muravyov, but as far as he could listen, it seems that the conversation was ordinary. At the end of their conversation, Bestuzhev turned and said: “We are all members here”; only at that very second, having a suspicion that there must be something hidden in Bestuzhev’s words, and having collected in my thoughts Bestuzhev’s conversation, which I had with him before, confirmed to me that his intention was to lure me into some kind of connection, that is A minute later he took his hat, called Wrangel, and went home to the apartment, without hearing any more words; Walking along the road, we made various guesses with Wrangel, where his conversation might be heading, we said: if these words contained any secret, then Muravyov and Bestuzhev would not have dared to announce to us, knowing that we did not know their intentions.
Bella Chagall. Гопящие огни / Пеп. c fp. N. Mavlevich. - M.: Text, 2001 (series "Collection"). - 351 p., country; circulation 5000 copies; ISBN 5-7516-0205-6.
The memoirs of Marc Chagall's wife, published for the first time in Russian, are written in Yiddish - but in this case translated from French. The life of wealthy Vitebsk Jews : eight children, a jewelry store, a Jewish cook and a Russian maid, a mother on whose shoulders lies the management of all commercial affairs, a father occupied only with the Torah and prayers, women in wigs, stuffed fish, endless holiday candles, Jewish grooms and Jewish brides whose parents come to the store to choose gifts for the wedding. A boy and a girl hide from the old rabbi, not wanting to learn the alphabet, and together with their mother they burst into tears over every sacred line uttered on the holiday. Full annual cycle: New Year, then the Feast of Tabernacles, then the Feast of the Torah, then the first snow falls, then the Hanukkah candle is lit, then Purim comes, then Easter. And, of course, Saturday, which begins on Thursday. The year is based on holidays; it is only for them that everyday life exists. The child, through whose eyes all this is seen, does not change: he has no age, and what is happening has no dates. The performance seen in distant childhood is recreated in its entirety, without the participation of destructive reflection.
What can be called everyday life is taken beyond the scope of “Burning Fires” - into the book “My Notebooks”; however, even here everything is covered with some kind of flair, sharp corners, major troubles, terrible secrets are absent. Separately - “First Meeting”, the story of meeting Chagall , like everything else, seems to have been written for the eyes of Chagall himself: at the end Bella begins to address her reader on a first name basis - “Do you remember?” In the preface to the book, published after the author’s death, Chagall defines her style as “the style of a Jewish bride.” He compares the words written by his wife to paints on a canvas - but still he also makes illustrations.
Quote: - For my dear husband Shmul-Noach. May he be in good health and live to be one hundred and twenty years old!Mom pulls the wick, blesses it, waters it with tears and rubs it with a large piece of wax, as if she wants to imbue it with good deeds.
- Hold the end tight, Little Tower. For my dear son Isaac. May he be in good health and live happily to be one hundred and twenty years old...
She takes out the second wick and vigorously waxes it too.
- For my eldest daughter Anna...
The names follow each other, the wicks, yellowed by wax and tears, become overgrown with flesh. I can barely hold them by their loose ends. I try my best not to slip out.
Mom prays for a long time for all the children and relatives. I can hardly hear what she mutters. With each name a large tear falls and mixes with the wax. Here is another thick candle ready.
Efim Etkind . Notes of a non-conspirator. Barcelona prose / Preface. N.O. Guchinskaya, E. Libs-Etkind; afterword S.A. Lurie. - St. Petersburg: Academic Project, 2001. - 496 p., ill.; circulation 3000 copies; IBSN 5-7331-0182-2.
The collection includes two autobiographical books by E.G. Etkind (1918-1999), a famous philologist, theorist and practitioner of literary translation.
“Notes of a Non-Conspirator” (1975) is an immediate reaction to a collision with the Soviet meat grinder: in 1974, Etkind was fired from the Herzen Institute, stripped of his scientific titles and forced to emigrate. A sharp, sweeping narrative. Chopped phrases, granite chapters: “On the Eve”, “Justice”, “The Noose is Tightening”, “Civil Execution: A Drama in Five Acts”. From generosity there are lyrical digressions: “about progress”, “about dignity and freedom of choice”, “about state security”, “about cannibals”. Enclosed are archival documents, including Vigdor's transcript of Brodsky's second trial.
"Barcelona Prose" was written in the last years of his life and remained unfinished. Muted intonations, laconic short stories-parables: “Outwitted”, “It turned out okay”, “Double”, “Another”, “Silently”, “This is how we lived”.
Both there and there are perplexed attempts to find an adequate form for formless madness, to cope with a forked tongue. To reclaim words, names and surnames from the absurd, at the risk that from the outside all this may seem like petty settling of scores. The closest literary analogue is not “Records and Extracts” by Gasparov or even “Sofya Petrovna” by Lidia Chukovskaya, but “The Language of the Third Reich” by Victor Klemperer . With the caveat that Klemperer offers research, and Etkind offers raw material.
Quote: In time? Is something supposed to happen? I don’t know, but I have time: this feeling did not leave me for a moment. Maybe I can do it before my ill-wishers find out about the new edition of the Conversation and take measures to stop it? Maybe before the blow that they are going to inflict on me - who and when? I didn’t know anything, but I was used to living in a world of Kafkaesque nightmares.
Irina Sandomirskaya. Book about the Motherland: Experience in analyzing discursive practices. - Wien, 2001 (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach). - 286 p., ill.; circulation not specified; ISSN 0258-6819.
As Irina Sandomirskaya brilliantly proves, speaking about the Motherland is always a “celebration of untranslatability.” The researcher examines the “discourse about the Motherland” from all conceivable sides: rhetoric, grammar, plot, distribution of roles between the subjects of speech. Political, poetic, everyday languages. Primer, village prose, “soulful cinema”, “naive writing”. Construction of the Motherland - from a historical point of view. Deconstruction - with methodological. Fatherland, Motherland. “Small”, “great”, “heavenly”, “ours”. Expulsion, excommunication, forced deprivation of the Motherland, amputation, shock. Collapse of the Union.
Quote: It is no coincidence that the Motherland appears in this book in incoherent, fragmentary, unfinished phrases. The political muse babbles like the muse of poetry... The object of such speech is obviously absurd: what is said here is what is clear without words, what goes without saying. From the point of view of transmitting information, talking about the Motherland is absolutely redundant. Therefore, the discourse about the Motherland consists of hackneyed, flat, hackneyed commonplaces... The language of the Motherland does not communicate anything, but only expresses itself, showing us the Motherland, but without arguing for its necessity. It is this construction of language as a phenomenon (icon) of the Motherland that speaks of the Motherland as a sacred source of identification.
New world of Russian history: Forum of Japanese and Russian researchers. To the 60th anniversary of Professor Wada Haruka. - M.: Airo-XX, 2001. - 592 p.; circulation 1000 copies; ISBN 5-88735-099-7.
This valuable collection is dedicated to the anniversary of a prominent Japanese specialist in Russian history, who dealt mainly with the problems of the February Revolution, but also addressed populism, the Soviet period, perestroika and relations between Japan, the USSR and Korea. The final article, “The Asian Magnetic Field” of the Russian researcher, is dedicated to Wada Haruki. According to his scientific interests, three sections are allocated: “History of Russia in the second half of the 19th - early 20th centuries”, “Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union”, “Japan, Korea and Russia ". In most cases, the topics are quite new for Russian historiography; approximately half of the articles belong to Russian researchers. The articles by Yoshida Hiroshi and Takahashi Kazuhiko are devoted to the ordinary family law of peasants in the situation of a modernizing society and new approaches to the study of judicial reform, the article by Tsuchiya Yoshifuru - initiators and circumstances m creation of the first trade unions, the work of Nakai Kazuo - Taras Shevchenko (article written in Ukrainian). Alexander Ushakov writes about Russian military emigration, Irina Davidyan - about the problems of the political ideal in the mass post-revolutionary consciousness, Tamita Takeshi - about the party purge of Mikhail Sholokhov, Gennady Bordyugov - about the situation of the intelligentsia under Stalin, Matsui Noriaki and Matsudo Kiyohiro - about the private farming of collective farmers and the relations of state and party bodies in rural areas during the reign of Khrushchev.
Hasegawa Tsuyoshi, “Statehood, publicity and class: crime, police and the state during the Russian Revolution in Petrograd”: In the past, historians paid most attention to the struggle between the city and workers’ militia among themselves, not noticing that another important battle was also taking place in parallel, which affected a fundamental question about the nature of the state structure under the Provisional Government, namely the struggle between the mayor and the city police, which manifested itself as a struggle between the state and the public. For Kryzhanovsky and Kelson, the city police... had to be independent from the central government, stand above the political interests of all parties and be controlled only by the citizens themselves... Deprived of direct control over the police, the Provisional Government repeatedly tried to transfer the management of the city police to the jurisprudence diction of the mayor and replace Kryzhanovsky with Yurenev as head of the city police. The most intense struggle between the mayor and the city police continued for two months after the February Revolution.
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