The war a hundred years ago

Notes from F.A. Stepun’s “From the Letters of an Ensign-Artilleryman” (1916) I have not come across in book form for a long time. But you still want to have your favorite authors, especially those you re-read, on paper. So to receive this small volume as a gift (Aquarius, 2000) is a special joy.

I knew the plot outline of the epistolary narrative from Stepun’s memoirs “The Past and the Unfulfilled.” By the beginning of the war of 1914, the author had a military specialty as an artilleryman and, as an officer, had already attended camp training three times - in 1901, 1904 and 1911.

In 1914, a thirty-year-old artilleryman wrote to his mother and wife - first from the Galician front, then from near Riga, and then from various hospitals, where he spent almost a year. Then he writes again from the army, where after an injury he returned, as we would say recently, “fit for non-combatant duty in wartime,” that is, essentially unfit.

At the age of thirty, “warrant officer-artilleryman” Fyodor Stepun was an established scientist, publisher of the Logos magazine, a popular lecturer and generally “insider” in the educated circles of Russia and Germany. “Letters” are filled with the same freedom of thought and breathing that will be characteristic of his main book, “The Past and the Unfulfilled.” M.O. Gershenzon, at whose insistence “Letters”, published in 1916 in the journal “Northern Notes”, was published as a separate book, was undoubtedly a very insightful critic.

The peculiarity of Stepun’s worldview is the natural combination of the high and the everyday. He fearlessly reveals himself to the reader in religious experiences, and in personal, and in a keen-eyed description of the most monstrous aspects of the war: corpses on the battlefields, wounds, the stench of the infirmary, the humiliation of refugees, the shame of savagery, devastated churches.

The sublime - Christmas, the memory of loved ones, love for his wife, music, the holiness of friendship - all this is found not in supermundane heights, but here; everything is alive with the memory and desire of the author to remain himself, to preserve human dignity in any circumstances.

The author's inner freedom is remarkable: he never poses, does not strive to seem either more persistent, or more insightful, or more skillful, or particularly knowledgeable in military affairs. By the age of thirty, Stepun retained the ability to directly experience every little thing, be it a landscape that opened up on a march, a successfully dug trench, a frisky horse, an Easter meal in a trench, or a memorable musical phrase. Therefore, he always has something to write about, and only extreme fatigue sometimes forces him to limit himself to facts - which rarely happens.

At the same time, the texts of the letters show us a certain psychological dynamics: fatigue from the war as such is growing, not to mention the torment suffered due to a leg injury (this is almost a year of wandering around hospitals); the internal conflict of the commander, whose soldiers no longer want to remain soldiers, is also intensifying; comes to the fore . The desire for all this to end

Therefore, the news of a possible revolution in Petrograd gives Stepun hope - and he breaks off the letter he started earlier with the words “oh, if only it were true!” With this phrase—many years later in his memoirs Stepun will repeat it and call it thoughtless —he will end the first volume of “The Past and the Unfulfilled.”

And volume two will open with an analysis of February.

There, on the very first page (this is page 311 of the 1994 edition) we read: “In any case, we must remember that for the victory of evil in the world, it is not its blind executors who are primarily responsible, but the spiritually sighted servants of good.”

Rebekah Frumkina