Treasure owner

How collector René Guerra became the hero of spy detective and literary research

In Tibetan Buddhism, there is a concept of "hidden treasures". As a rule, these are manuscripts and other objects of the Buddhist cult, which since time immemorial have found shelter from hostile forces in the hard-to-reach caves of the Himalayan mountains and the sands of the Gobi desert.

Recently, 44 boxes with Buddhist shrines from a devastated monastery were dug out of the sands of this desert. They were saved in the 1930s from being plundered by Soviet and Mongolian soldiers by a monk named Tadev. The secret of the location of the sacred relics was kept by the son, and then the grandson of the monk. Twenty boxes still remain hidden in the desert, their search continues.

The new work of the Moscow critic Lola Zvonareva "The Silver Age of Rene Guerre" (St. Petersburg, "Rostok") is another story about the miraculous salvation of national shrines.

In the 1960s and 1980s, few people were interested in the artistic and literary heritage of the first wave of Russian emigration in the USSR and France. There was no fashion for Russian culture in exile in those days. Moreover, there was nothing to do with its creators, who live out their lives in oblivion and need. About how Rene Guerra saved books, magazines, manuscripts, paintings and graphic canvases of our outstanding emigrants and what extraordinary people they were, is a book by Lola Zvonareva.

The book contains Rene Guerra's commentary on the well-known thought of Zinaida Gippius that "the motherland is dearer and above all, but without freedom there is no motherland." The French Slavist is right when he says that "this is the most important lesson that emigration taught and left to posterity." He comes to the conclusion: “Practically the entire Silver Age migrated abroad. It turned out that one could take both Russia and freedom with oneself, and in unfree Russia there was no Russia itself.”

You can hardly imagine how one person managed to collect the world's largest collection of Russian emigration art - 50,000 volumes of rare books, periodicals, thousands of unpublished autographs, photographs, postcards of those years, more than 5,000 works by famous Russian artists.

Arriving in Moscow in 1968 as a Slavist trainee, Rene Guerra found himself, on the one hand, in an environment of intelligent and free-thinking youth, and on the other hand, under the control of the competent authorities. But he already had the experience, gained in France, of how to lead a double life. After all, even then he was accepted into the “White Russian” environment, which his communist-minded teachers should not have guessed about.

Guerra became especially close to Boris Konstantinovich Zaitsev. At his request, he brought to the USSR three copies of the book "The River of Time" - the literary testament of the writer. The books were intended for K.I. Chukovsky, V.P. Nekrasov and L.N. Nazarova, an employee of the Pushkin House. They were delivered to them, but the "courier" itself fell into the "development" of the KGB.

All the vicissitudes of the plot of "The KGB and Rene Guerra" resemble a sketch of a spy detective. There is a frank confession of K.I. Chukovsky, his reflections on the nature of Soviet power, recorded by Guerra on a tape recorder. And it's all about tracking down and finally exposing the foreign intruder. About the leadership of this operation by the main ideologist of the country Suslov. The only, perhaps, significant gap in Lola Zvonareva's fundamental research is the absence in the text of funny and sometimes seemingly implausible stories about how more and more riches find themselves in the bins of a French collector.

The protagonist of the book is more than just a connoisseur of Russian culture. And he, of course, is not a maniac-collector. From his youth, Rene Guerra fell in love with the artistic image of Russia and those Russian people in whom this image was embodied. Rene Guerra did not find many of them alive, and therefore, with special zeal, he collected everything that was connected with their life and work. Small essays on outstanding representatives of the Russian literary and artistic emigration of the first wave, whose books, magazines, manuscripts, archives and paintings are in the Guerra collection, give credence to the indisputable fact that we are dealing not just with an outstanding private collection, but with a unique museum, familiarity with the materials of which is still limited by technical problems that can be completely solved at the interstate level.

Alexander Senkevich