The Culture channel is preparing a new series of programs by the famous publicist Marietta Chudakova

Marietta CHUDAKOVA

The series “Affairs of Literary Epochs of the USSR” almost coincided in time with one of the latest VTsIOM polls reflecting “affairs of social eras of Russia”: the population once again spoke in favor of introducing censorship. This series will help remind the population of the times of censorship. “Censorship restrictions constrain literature, crush, cripple,” says 20th-century literary historian, professor at the Literary Institute, member of the European Academy Marietta Chudakova, in the introduction to her author’s programs, “but in order to stop the writer completely, he must be destroyed...”

The cycle will include four programs: “Suicide as a duel”, “The Bible of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s work”, “Foreigner with devilry”

(about a new hero in Soviet literature) and “Bunin, Babel and others.”

“Ogonyok” publishes an essay that formed the basis of the “Suicide as a Duel” program.

Marina Tsvetaeva recalls: “The first thing I learned about Pushkin was that he was killed. Then I found out that Pushkin is a poet, and Dantes is French.”

Note: first I found out about his death. Only then about his poems.

“Dantes hated Pushkin because he himself could not write poetry, and challenged him to a duel, that is, lured him into the snow and there killed him with a pistol in the stomach. So, at the age of three, I firmly learned that the poet has a stomach... We were all wounded in the stomach with this shot.”

Since childhood, she has seen on the wall in her mother’s bedroom a black and white picture of “Duel,” where the eternal black deed of murdering a poet by the mob is being carried out in the whiteness of the snow. Pushkin was my first poet, and my first poet was killed.”

One of the main events in Eugene Onegin is the death of the young poet Lensky in a duel. We almost never see people dying a so-called natural death in Pushkin’s works. His poetic subject is violent death. In a duel. In battle there is almost always a glorious death for warriors on both sides - “There is rapture in battle...”. Executions in Poltava, Pugacheva in The Captain's Daughter. Playing with death, with fate—in “The Stone Guest” and in “A Feast in the Time of Plague.”

In Pushkin's works there is the least interest in suicide. In essence, there are only two cases. And the suicides are only women, and not of the noble class (the miller’s daughter in “Rusalka”) or of another confession—in “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” The word “suicide” itself appears only three times in Pushkin’s—so rich—dictionary.

FROM THE BACK WAY

Pushkin's last, deadly duel had every reason to receive the status of a unique, one-of-a-kind phenomenon. But it turned out differently. Almost on the day of his death, January 29, 1837, Lermontov’s poem “The Death of a Poet” appeared and began to quickly spread in the lists. Lermontov accused the entire high society of the poet’s death: “He rebelled against the opinions of the world / Alone, as before... and was killed!”

It could be understood this way: he was driven to a duel and death, just as he was driven to suicide. Death in a duel is equivalent to murder. As often happens in Russia, the authorities themselves contributed to the consolidation of such a view by shockingly interfering in the funeral procedure: the funeral service was announced in one place, but at night they were taken out of the house to another, the Stable Church; professors were forbidden to let students out of classrooms that day. Pushkin was sent from St. Petersburg to his final resting place, in the Svyatogorsk Monastery near Pskov, in the dead of night! The authorities themselves assumed the pose of a criminal covering their tracks.

More than 100 years later, this will be enshrined in the beautiful lines of German Plisetsky: “Poets, bastard children of Russia! They always carried you out the back door!”

DUE TO SOCIETY'S FAULT

Four and a half years pass after the death of Pushkin—and Lermontov himself dies in a duel! If Pushkin still had a funeral service, then Lermontov was buried in Pyatigorsk without a funeral service - like a suicide. Now Lermontov, who did not even have time to meet Pushkin, turns out to be inseparably connected with him: both died in a duel - due to the fault of society, and ultimately, the authorities.

His poem “The Death of a Poet” begins to serve as an explanation for his own untimely death.

But the matter doesn't end there. 10 years after the death of Lermontov, Herzen’s work “On the Development of Revolutionary Ideas in Russia” was published abroad in German. A martyrology of Russian poets, which quickly became famous, was built there - all of them, according to Herzen, died due to the fault of society, that is, the authorities: “Ryleev was hanged by Nikolai. Pushkin was killed in a duel... Griboyedov was treacherously killed in Tehran.”

The line between murder and duel, which was fundamentally important for Pushkin, is also blurred. For him, a duel is a sphere of personal choice, the realization of the opportunity to dispose of his two main capitals - life and honor, if it comes up - to sacrifice life for the sake of preserving honor.

Personal choice no longer appears in Herzen's list. Instead of individual conflicts, there are social ones. This approach will subjugate Russian public consciousness for many decades and will become commonplace. Lermontov's interpretation of Pushkin's duel remains the starting point here.

In Soviet times, the duels of two poets—Pushkin and Lermontov—were firmly assigned a single interpretation. In the mid-30s, in connection with the ambiguous situation of preparing for the magnificent celebration of the anniversary of Pushkin’s death, the official interpretation of the deadly duels of poets as murders by their authorities intensified.

In 1926, Khodasevich, already in exile, included in his list of writers who died due to the fault of society Herzen himself, and Chernyshevsky, and Dostoevsky. But also the victims of the early Soviet era: “...the executed boy-poet Paley and the executed Gumilyov...”. The young poet Paley, cousin of Nicholas II, was shot and thrown into a mine in 1918. Khodasevich ends his list with a very recent death—“Yesenin brought to a loop.”

“SOMEONE ELSE SHOOT”

But before we talk about Yesenin’s death, let’s remember - what kind of violent death will we encounter in censored Soviet literature, which has changed greatly compared to the 19th century? Death in battle, which was sung by Pushkin and Lermontov? No, now the possibility of its poetic glorification depended entirely on the color of the army in whose ranks the deceased fought - were they white or red? If they are white, then the most they deserved was one song line: “...On the Don and in Zamość / White bones are smoldering...” The line, I must say, in a poetic sense, is wonderful...

In Pushkin’s “Boris Godunov,” the chronicler Pimen says: “...we angered God, we sinned: / We called the regicide Master for ourselves.” And Anna Akhmatova talks about an announcement she saw in the canteen for political prisoners: “Pies are only for regicides.”

The favorite theme of the poets of the first Soviet decade was execution. And the poets themselves are ready to die for the glory of the revolution. This is based on the denial of the value of life as such and the very right to life. The duel (along with the very concept of honor) disappeared from Soviet everyday life and, accordingly, from literature. Suicide, alas, could not disappear from the life of society.

But it was neither a literary nor a topic worthy of public attention at all.

Yesenin made suicide his literary theme.

Mayakovsky in his article “How to Make Poems” writes that “in the morning the newspapers brought the dying lines: “In this life, dying is not new, / But living, of course, is not new...” After these lines, Yesenin’s death became a literary fact.” He began to write a poem “To Sergei Yesenin”, ending with the words: “In this life it is not difficult to die, / To make life much more difficult.”

On April 16, 1926, these poems were published. And exactly 4 years later, on April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky’s shot rang out in a room in Lubyansky Proezd.

In one of his early, pre-Soviet poems, he wrote: “More and more often I think / shouldn’t it be better / to put a bullet point at my end...” Now the “bullet point” he had placed immediately changed his idea of his whole life. Tsvetaeva will write: “He lived like a man, he died like a poet.”

And many lines in his poetry were questioned: “It is necessary for a poet to be an expert in life,” and much more. His unauthorized death made the new social order, which had been established by his own words for more than 10 years, doubtful.

Mayakovsky's death began to be interpreted by his own students. “Condemn suicide?” asked Mikhail Koltsov. “Of course, condemn it!” Didn’t Mayakovsky himself condemn him a thousand times?” But who is to blame? “You can’t ask a real, full-fledged Mayakovsky for committing suicide. Someone else shot, randomly, temporarily taking possession of the weakened psyche of the poet-social activist and revolutionary. We, contemporaries, friends of Mayakovsky, demand that these testimonies be registered..."

Denying the possibility of such an end for the “full-fledged” Mayakovsky, his comrades sought to establish the shadow figure of the “second” Mayakovsky, who killed the “first.” No matter how clumsy this idea was, in the reality of the 30s and subsequent Soviet years, where metaphors were realized, it had a latent effect. And it most likely influenced the emergence of a persistent (revived in the 90s) apocrypha about the murder of the poet (“Someone else shot...”).

BULLET POINT

But the same apocrypha arose about Yesenin. Why? His death remained an individual event. Until Mayakovsky's suicide occurred.

The names of Yesenin and Mayakovsky were strongly—polarly—connected during their lifetimes. Anna Akhmatova “rhymes” them easily: “...Mayakovsky and Yesenin were both teenagers, one urban, the other rural...”. Pasternak called Yesenin a rival of Mayakovsky “in the arena of the people’s revolution and in the hearts of people. <...> Compared to Yesenin, Mayakovsky’s gift is heavier and rougher, but perhaps deeper and more extensive.”

The similarity of death—and the unexpectedness of this similarity—fused these names inextricably. Mayakovsky’s death crossed out the denying, diminishing interpretation of suicide in his own poem “To Sergei Yesenin.” Now one death enlarged another.

The comparison of the two deaths led even further. The Pushkin-Lermontov pairing moved towards the Yesenin-Mayakovsky pairing. And all four after April 14 were united in public, but not official, not published perception.

Mayakovsky’s “bullet point,” which revived the memory of dueling pistols in the collective memory, ran along an invisible cord and connected all four deaths. She seemed to have drawn a geometric figure—something like a parallelogram, in each of the four corner points of which was the name of one of the dead poets.

P *----------------*L

EAT

The invisible outline reinforced the idea of the common fate of all four. The idea of violence is now transferred to Yesenin and Mayakovsky, who died at their own hands. With even greater justification than in the case of a duel, the idea of a collective culprit appears.

DEFENSE OF HONOR

For everyone who received a Soviet school education in the second half of the 30s and subsequent years, who became acquainted with the biography of Mayakovsky, already knowing the main thing about the death of Pushkin and Lermontov, and learning about the death of Yesenin only outside the walls of the school, an unspoken and, perhaps, an incompletely formulated question: “Okay, those, as they explained to us, were killed by Nikolaev Russia. And who are these?..”

In 1967, Korney Chukovsky describes in his diary an incident at a school he knew near Moscow, near his home in Peredelkino. “There is a new teacher of Russian language and literature at the Chobotov school. He instilled in the children that under the autocracy all poets died in duels. No one died a natural death. One girl innocently asked:

—And in Soviet times, why did Mayakovsky shoot himself? And Yesenin?

The girl was declared a villain and wanted to be expelled from school, and she was happy when she was severely reprimanded and disgraced in front of the whole class.”

There was a transfer of the opposition “poet-authority”, “poet-society” of that era to modern times.

A duel is a defense of honor. The duelist announces to society that honor for him is equivalent to life. The inability to challenge a duel due to a sharp difference in position, when the opponent was a member of the reigning house, could lead to suicide, which also confirmed the presence of honor.

The Soviet people were obliged to endure insults from the authorities. Any manifestation of a feeling of offended honor caused a cry: “Who are you offended by? Are you offended by the party?!” Therefore, in Soviet conditions, suicide could be seen as the only means of protecting personal honor, as a duel with the authorities, when one shoots in the air and himself goes to the enemy’s gun. And the authorities were offended, sensing this “dueling” aftertaste. The duel was once purifying. Suicide could now serve the same role. That is why the Soviet government hated suicides so much, because those stained by it had to walk with an indelible mark.

Rethinking the death of Mayakovsky (transferring from “personal” reasons to “public”) was much more sensitive for officialdom than rethinking Yesenin’s end. Yesenin, at worst, looked like a victim of a time that he “could not fully understand.” Mayakovsky, who himself had built the building of a new society before everyone’s eyes, was now bringing it down, dragging it with him to the grave.

Photo from the Ogonyok ARCHIVE

Duel with the authorities