Oleg Dark. Inscription on the book

Inscription on the book
Oleg Dark

Date of publication: September 21, 2001

The other day I bought a four-volume book by Flaubert : M, Pravda publishing house, 1971 (Ogonyok library). I have never owned the collected works of Flaubert. Price - 50 rubles, today - for free. Previous editions have long been cheap, ah! There is always something nostalgic about purchasing them. For comparison: 15 volumes of Stendhal in the same store cost 100. The question is: how many times more expensive is Flaubert? I love numbers, although I have trouble remembering them. On the back of each volume there is an inscription, I don’t know how it affects it. “To my dear Ira on her twenty-fifth birthday, with all my heart, November 20, 1973 Astrakhan Mom - Zoya” Punctuation - original. The inscription varies slightly.

The line under the addressee's name (not everywhere) and the dash after "mother" are very touching. Option without it : " from Zoya's mother." (Was there another? And this adopted one, my father’s wife? Astrakhan is far away.) Or the order of the lines changes: first the signature, then the place and time, and vice versa. It’s as if it was composed anew for each volume, with a new feeling. Did the donor take care of her constant presence during the reading? Did you think that inscribed ones are four times more difficult to part with? I wonder if Irochka has read Flaubert, she is now 52. Astrakhan is like Toast or Yonville, where Emma lived, and then Nogent.

1973 - two years since the anniversary collection of works (150 years of Flaubert), in Astrakhan it is, of course, easier to get than in Moscow. I think “Irochka” is a Muscovite. “To Moscow, to Moscow” is beginning to sound to me like “Flaubert, Flaubert!” He actually goes there (he is sent). And the sender is behind him (mentally). And reading Flaubert for “simple souls” like his Felicite means something different than for those whom he came to along with Proust and Valéry. Flaubert - France, Paris, Bois de Boulogne (vision approaches, pupil contracts). The caresses of Emma and her boyfriend hidden by the cab have an exotic appeal. They are not like sadly virtuous coquetry with an elderly colleague or neighbor in the kitchen.

The inscription on the book always becomes part of it (included in the plot), which the donor spontaneously knew about. The inscription unites the volumes, perhaps for the first time, as their “common part”, only transforming them into a “collected works”. 2001 - 180 years since the birth of Flaubert, 150 - from the beginning of work on "Bovary" (autumn), 120 - from the publication of the novel "Bouvard and Pécuchet" and 28 years of the inscription on the book I purchased... Why should we only celebrate " round" dates?

“Inscriptions on books” is a genre of the novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet”. Of course, they are of a different kind: not dedications, but notes in the margins (the margins are wide). Like the fact that comedy “teaches the art of shades,” or morality is “devoid of basis,” or “a noun always agrees with a verb, except in those cases when it does not agree” (this is in grammar). Tell your students who have long suspected this. The inscriptions connect the lives of the inscribers in the interval between them, which the writer makes known.

His advantage is that he invents the inscriptions and therefore only can know them . And I will never know anything about the former owners of the book. The thought of their lives unknown to me almost makes it difficult to read. The 20th century “discovered” the inscription and the “marginal note” as an independent artistic genre. The discovery is that the thought expressed is indifferent, only the one who wrote it is interesting . The thought can be anything.

A couple of simple-minded people go to the province where the estate is purchased, and begin to consistently master - first practically, then theoretically (and vice versa) - each of the areas of human knowledge and experience. In Flaubert, everyone is provincial, and if in the capital, then they are newcomers, like the Libyan Matho, in love with Salammbô, or Iokanam in Jerusalem. From reading to experimenting and always back. Any knowledge (experience), of course, should help to exist in the world . What other meaning is there in his explanation ? Flaubert has his own scores to settle with the idea of ​​“utility”. The acquittal (!) verdict in the case of Madame Bovary taught: literature, if it “wants to be useful... must maintain purity and chastity.” The resentment remains.

For example, gymnastics can be used to save drowning people and in case of fire. But the friends did not dare to ask the peasants for children in order to learn how to carry them in sacks. One day Bouvard became dizzy on a dilapidated wall. Another time Pécuchet fell off his stilts. Then gymnastics was abandoned too.

Dizziness is now a common state of heroes (since they began to read ), this occurred in Frederick from “Education of the Senses” - in a street crowd or at a ball. I don’t know of another novel where there are so many crowds (in the “war scenes” of War and Peace). In "Education of Sentiments" there is an abundance of balls, dance evenings, and mass entertainment, which include "street riots", barricades, and the storming of the palace. The world Flaubert describes is irritatingly disordered and noisy. It makes your head spin: representatives of different nations, population groups and mythological creatures flash by at a costumed, then they called it a masked, ball. Flaubert loves mummers. at Salambo Tribes crowd and jostle . Heroes in love find themselves in the crowd. Flaubert's novels are about love in a crowd. That is why his hero is a provincial, because he is a traditional image of a man who has fallen from a rarefied space into an oversaturated one. In "Bouvard and Pécuchet" there is a crush of books and thoughts. If you make visible the emergence of thoughts in your head and remove this visible on film from the inside, the result is the novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet.”

Thoughts are spinning, and along with them, my head is spinning. Dizziness always gives rise to fear and confusion. But they also presuppose each other. Fear takes possession of the confused, confusion makes fear accessible. Flaubert's heroes are frightened (or afraid). It turns out that it is better not to read (not to know). Knowledge, including literary knowledge, does not help (to exist, to navigate), but confuses. The book is confusing. What’s interesting: the drama of the characters painfully experiencing information. Its details. Their horror, not aphorisms, witty or naive. Confusion.

Fear - from arising in the imagination and haunting visions of what is happening (has happened): in the digestive system, among the stars, during the emergence of the world or the preparation of a volcano for an eruption. It seems to the heroes that it’s about to start again . They calm each other down. They imagine the earth trembling, or “phalluses everywhere” - this is when they studied ancient cults. A disaster can happen at any moment. Any reading is disastrous if taken seriously. Because the assumptions of scientists contradict each other (about how it really happened) , the monstrousness of the paintings occurs. This is how centaurs or harpies were born in myths. Perseus was confused at the sight of Medusa.

The heroes are planning to write a biography of the “blockhead” Duke of Angoulême in order to practice the biographical genre. But it turns out that his picturesque portraits (lie?) do not agree well. What to do if Balzac and the zoologist Cuvier are equally “dreamers”, and physiology is “simply a fantastic medical novel”. They would like certainty in history or psychology, as in geometry or algebra.

Even exceptions are “wrong” - in biology or grammar. Bouvard no longer believes “in matter,” and Pécuchet falls ill from the inability to prove the existence of God. You can never tell about the world what it is like. A point of view with which the 19th century found it difficult to reconcile. And that means we can also celebrate one of the anniversaries of uncertainty in literature. For any comically petty statement, there is its equally true (incorrect) opposite.

From the "Lexicon of Common Truths", which Flaubert was going to include in "Bouvard and Pécuchet": "Lingerie - The less you show, the better (the worse)." This bracket with an answer option is very modern. Or: “Brunettes are more ardent than blondes (see Blondes).” About blondes it’s the opposite. What if this is not a mockery of vulgarities, but a very serious experience of the inability to affirm? Flaubert - Bouvard and Pécuchet. The 20th century “discovered” that the better scientific theory is the one that is internally more artistic (better constructed). They are all "fantasy novels".

It is difficult to avoid the temptation and not assume: under the influence of Flaubert too. He developed ways to “talk about uncertainty.” Maurois “caught” himself at the beginning of the paragraph with “Flaubert’s “and”. A grammatical innovation that Flaubert brought to French speech. A way of adding a new contradiction that destroys the image of an object. “And” the object dissipates . Hence the preference for verbs of the imperfect form (noted by Proust).

"Bouvard and Pécuchet" remained unfinished. But it couldn’t (shouldn’t) end. There is a fundamentally endless stringing of new spheres of human thought and activity that reveal inconsistency (uncertainty). Endless discovery of new uncertainties. Of course, the types of human activity and the books written are exhaustible. There would inevitably be a problem with the continuation of the plot. We would have to start all over again. It would be necessary for the heroes, in order to avoid madness or illness, to abandon the goal or meaning (in science or literature) and enjoy actions that lead to nothing: description, observation or action. As soon as the idea of ​​possession (of a beloved, a sacred object, knowledge or position in society) arises, a person goes crazy. about it He may not know . Reminds me of Maurois’s thought: “a person is allowed to idolize the sacred cover, but the one who touches it dies” (about “Salambo”). Doesn't remind me.

Turgenev refused to translate Flaubert’s saddest “legend” “A Simple Soul” because “it is impossible to translate” and “less successful” (it’s also good that “impossible” precedes the assessment). "There's one stupid, downtrodden maid... focusing her love on a parrot, which she mixes with a dove representing the Holy Spirit... You can imagine the cry of the censorship!!" (To Stasyulevich). And what does “impossible” refer to?

Here the 19th century argues with the 20th, when the reader learns to enjoy the fact that the Holy Spirit in the icon is a “living portrait of Lulu” (the parrot). Rational motivation is characteristic of Flaubert: “God the Father could not make a dove his messenger - after all, doves do not know how to speak...”. For Flaubert, choosing words (consonants to vowels), the ability to speak necessarily accompanied a significant event.

From Flaubert's de-Romanization of the novel, "all modern literature originates" (J. Genette): aversion to action (for Flaubert - "a most boring matter"), "accurate recording" of "scattered facts", "empty spaces" of descriptions, exclusion from the work any manifestations of the author’s self (in Flaubert: there is no need to “love anything”), the project “not to say anything”... This refers to this remaining vagueness, absent-mindedness, atomization, some kind of vagueness of the subject, its undefinedness (it constantly merged with the background ). Flaubert had a plan (and an attractive one - “beautiful” in its impracticability; he had no intention of carrying it out ) for “books about nothing.”

But the attractiveness of Flaubert, like any “transitional figure,” is that new features of the novel (already almost a non-novel) appeared by themselves, almost accidentally and imperceptibly... Brackets with an answer option or an initial “and”. And suddenly I noticed and was worried: the mediocrity of the characters and the lack of events. I was afraid that it would be “uninteresting.” A painful physical tension arose, compensating for the lethargy of the plot, between the traditional form of a strict narrative (“About six o’clock in the morning on September 15, 1840, the steamship “City of Montero...” and so on - see any beginning of Balzac’s novel) and the new features of the disintegrating genre. Impossibility choice. While the literature that followed Flaubert (which chose him) became impossible to read (“uninteresting”), Flaubert accustomed literature to inaction.

It is common to talk about Flaubert's amazing experiment in depicting mediocrity. It seems that his heroes are not quite usually mediocre in literature. Is it possible to have a mediocre hero in a novel? Usually the writer “cannot stand it”; he cannot help but manifest himself in the characters. Maupassant's Georges Duroy soon regained the exclusivity necessary for a hero. And that’s why he became one. "Dear Friend" is an adaptation of "Education of Sentiments", and even the title is from Flaubert's novel. Flaubert himself is guilty of referring to his characters as “woodlice” (his favorite word).

It seems that he considered “talent”, “creativity” - of a writer or a commander, all the same - an external, additional and incidental sign, like social origin or income, and a person’s everyday feelings and intentions are relatively independent of talents. Flaubert did not depict his talents. He probably considered himself such a woodlice.

Woodlice in the sociopsychological sense means “neither this nor that,” “neither fish nor fowl.” One about whom judgment or opinion is impossible. He is burdened by creativity: “boring, boring...”, “endless romance”, “I’m exhausted”, when will it end? And he almost hates the scenes that have to be written. They cause "disgust". (A biographer called him a “masochist” for this.) What a “delightful thing it is to write”—in another letter—“I was both man and woman, lover and mistress” and “horses, leaves, wind...”. Where is Flaubert? He is gone, he has disappeared.

The thirst for reincarnation inspired the idea that he was either a great actor or a playwright. His comedies were rightly booed. It seems he was attracted to what didn't work out. And vice versa. About the almost perfect Madame Bovary: “The style is not so polished” (read in a magazine). An early title of Sentimental Education, The Losers, can also be attributed to the author. “Life’s failure” was that, dreaming of an oriental story or a chivalric romance, he “floundered” in “smelly” plots. But who forced? Baudelaire noted: the author “as if on a dare” chose vulgar heroes.

He liked “dreaming about wonderful works” more than writing them. And he spent three days writing one page. Sometimes longer. His ideal is a dilettante aristocrat who writes “for his own pleasure” and out of whim: he is not published, despises the reader and is certainly rich. The thought of a professional writer was terrifying. And he obediently edited his works at the request of friends and editors. Add to this the exact date for the completion of the work, which he set for himself three to four years in advance and strictly observed. He also planned when he would finish reading the book. Flaubert is a pedant.

He insisted almost angrily that “the book may be full of gross blunders” and “collecting local material” was “of secondary importance.” And he could not begin the novel without seeing “with his own eyes” “all the plants and all the trees” that would appear there. To get acquainted with the production of earthenware, I went to the factory, to see children with croup - to the hospital (this is for a small scene on the page).

“The time of Beauty has passed... - in one letter. “We will extract it from any object... let us train ourselves to look at the world as a work of art...” - in another. But this is not hesitation or evolution, he felt everything this at the same time. He asserted that “great people easily achieve an effect beyond any Mastery.” Rabelais, Cervantes, Moliere “are great because they do not have any techniques.” And in Goncourt’s “Diary” it is recorded how he checked the work by reading aloud, to "adjust to the movement of human lungs," and prepared the intonations of phrases that had not yet been written (Gautier said). Once it was necessary to change the name. He spent a long time coming up with it to keep the same number of consonants...

In addition to specific stylistic signs, Flaubert set the type of writer for future literature, which seemed to complete the idea of ​​​​the indefinability of the subject. (He often spoke of the need to “take the point of view of the subject.”) And the writer is also the subject. He is an indeterminate (and indefinable) writer of whom one can never say who he is. It is very difficult to write memoirs about him. He almost disappears or hides. He is nothing like Odysseus.