Escapists

" E Scape - run (from conclusion, captivity); make an escape; run away; leave; turn off; avoid (dangers); escape; get rid; to break out; to leave; run away; run away; get rid; disconnect; pull away; close in yourself; volatilize; slip away from attention; Min; get off; stand out; survive"

In the book, which will be discussed later, I came across an amazing biographical note: “The British esthete and eccentric (1906–87), who spent the most last part of the last years of life in bed in Wilsford Manor, inventing clothes for the heroes of his not written novel, which takes place in Marseille.” The great essay, which had not settled from the workbench of this wonderful person, was called “Lascar”, sometimes “History of Primorsky Boulevard”, sometimes “History that should be forgotten”. The name of Lezheboka - Stephen Tennant; He was really aesthetic, eccentric, as well as an aristocrat and homosexual. Tennant, the older, the more time spent in bed, but not because of weakness or illness, but for ideological reasons. He was a fundamental, convinced loafer, he was only interested (accordingly understood by him) beauty, everything else caused either contempt or (most often) horror. Stephen Tennant was a typical character in the English aristocratic life of the 1920-30s, life, brilliantly and exhaustively described by Woodhaus and Ilin Was. By the way, the latter used some features of a beautiful sloth in his best novel “Returning to Bride Sud”, turning, however, a carefree esthet into the tragic alcoholic Sebastian Flyta. Of course, such a person as Tennant literally asked for the pages of the “psychological” prose of the last century, which was also preoccupied with what was called “characters” in the 19th century: in the 1930s, the tennant’s ally in the interwa generation of “brilliant youth” Nancy Mitford brought him out in the novel “Love in the Cold Climate”, and already under the sunset of his little life. Stephen Tennant became the hero of Naipol's book “The Riddle of the Encoming”. Finally, after the death of our aesthet, his biography was composed by a certain Philippe Khoer, once-the manager of the punk group, the provincial Southemon's decadent; In this book, with the remarkable name “Serious Entertainment”, the biographer tells how Tennant walked back in the spotted leopard pajamas in the twenties, made makeup, painted under the blond and pouring with golden dust. How can you not insert such a wonderful freak into a novel?

But he, nevertheless, was a real aesthet, and not an ordinary sloth or one of the many British eccentric-aristocrats. Stephen Tennant is a collector, the author of epistolary prose and even a drawer, if you recall the sketches of costumes to his unwritten novel. As for the first, he collected things that he himself considered “works of art”, relying on his own whimsical taste, and not on the opinion of bugs-asuctionists, or stored artifacts related to artistic flour related to the outcome of the Marcel Sailor. For example, in the mid-1960s, Tennant arranged an exhibition and sale of paintings in London, for some the buyer could find those most mysterious Laskar (as the Sailors-Indians were called in England). Yes, a wonderful novel was not written, but at our disposal there are drawings depicting his heroes. About ten to twenty years ago, those who wanted to buy them at auctions Christiz and Sotbis . “Nothing special,” you say. And right. These sketches themselves are unlikely to be interesting to anyone other than admirers and continuers of the Oscaruayld line in life, but along with leopard pajamas, life in bed, brilliant passages of “returning to Braidshead”-all this gives rise to a completely new, amazing experience of a completely different, unlike life, which does not care about us. And we, as it turns out, is. Is it possible here to find the beginnings of new phenomenology? Maybe it's time for us to stop being interested only in what is related to us? Is it not to stop this eternal mental incest? If so, then Long live the extreme exoticism - and the lezbok Tennant is his prophet.

So what did he do for years, which - according to the rumor - spent in bed? First of all, an epistolary. Stephen Tennant endlessly wrote letters; I think that today Gmail would find the most enthusiastic admirer in it. In the mid-sixties, one of his correspondents was a young Bruce Chartwin, in the future-the famous traveler and writer, and then a retired auctionist, a participation of the archaeological department of the University of Edinburgh. It is in the Chartwin correspondence published in 2010 . Sun.​ The Letters of Bruce Chatwin / Selected and Edited by Elizabeth Chatwin and Nicholas Shakespeare. L .: Jonathan Cape , 2010 ) I found a brief biographical certificate with which this text began. I already had to write about this wonderful book; Now I am only interested in the plot associated with the experience of another (not another person, but simply another, different), as important for himself. So, Tennant and Chatwin were clearly located to each other, despite the seemingly the exact opposite of their lives. One is an aristocrat, the Prophet Leni, a homebody, who never went beyond the limits laid by him (albeit moderate, but still) wealth. I didn’t write the books of his life (in fact, it seems, it seems), I wrote almost nothing at all, except that it is worth recalling the poem “The Higher Subject” dedicated to the same Chartwin ... The other is the trampus, which was emerging and traveled half the world, forever in anticipation of a money transfer from the publisher, the author of famous books, a successful auctionist and the failed archaeologist, a preacher Writing his main novel “UTC”, whose hero was the collector, homebody, thin and calculating esthete. What is in common between them?

And here it is: another as the meaning of your own life. In the world that is preoccupied with the image, explanation and change, they showed an example of pure renunciation of the pressing, more precisely, from what seems to be pressing. Following Batyushkov, Tennant and Chatwin could say “Alien is my treasure”, adding a phrase from a notebook of a crazy Russian poet: “What to say about the present! It hardly exists. " Actually, if there are true travelers in the world, then they are a tireless tramp in an eternal flight from a settled world, and not crawling out of bed Frick; Both are thoroughly poisoned by delightful, outrageous aesthetics and indestructible indifference to everything that is beyond their rather strange interests. At the same time, indifference does not exclude the observation and accuracy of the description, it has nothing to do with worthless distraction. When Bruce Chatwin in a fit of scientific love (or - something the same - academic auster) studied at an archaeologist, he had to travel around the countries of the social camp: museums and excavations. He ended up in Czechoslovakia a year before the Prague Spring; Here is an excerpt from his letter to his wife Elizabeth: “Prague is one of the most curious places in the world. She is extremely bourgeois and probably has always been so. Communism has been established here very fragile, and, I would say, it will not last long. It is almost impossible to meet at least one communist here. They laugh even in trams and buses. Those who are younger could become communists, but they are unlikely to admit it. This is perhaps one of the few places in the world where you can hear how the actions of the Americans in Vietnam protect. They passionately do not like Russians and Chinese. Many people speak English, and once in the excavation I listened to a whole lecture of a person, in appearance-a peasant, about the advantages of the outcome and how England gave the education of the whole world. The world is full of surprises. "

43 years have passed since then. Stephen Tennant fell in bed to eighty-one and died in 1987. Two years later, Bruce Chatwin died of AIDS - progressive cretins of all continents still cannot forgive him that he has not announced his illness in advance, in the views of public attention to an important social problem. In the same 1989, as the author of the “Utts” suggested, Communism quietly withdrew from Czechoslovakia through the velvet path caring by Wenceslav with Vaclav. In Prague, a new life began, in which English does not teach English without need, and not only loves not only Russians and Chinese, but in general, all, including, it seems, themselves. A delightful, ragged city, in which in the late sixties you could meet Bruce Chatvin, Merab Mamardashvili, Hulio Cortasara, Roman Jacobson (not to mention his Bogumil Grabal and Milosha Formane) turned into a tourist attraction with excessively high prices. But, nevertheless, even now you can go to the Museum of Medieval Art in the Monastery of St. Anezhka and admire the wild portraits of the master of Theodorik. Chatwin was right - one of the most interesting places in the world. Estetes, in the end, are always right.

See also other texts of the author:

• Nostalgic modernist (travelers: The second case)
• Russian Swedenborg (from the cycle "Travelers". Case one)
• Features of the lifestyle and values
• Magic Prague (to the history of one defeat)
• Never write for newspapers