In reality and in literature

Two Nobel novels about the Russian Revolution - “Quiet Don” and “Doctor of Zhivago” - are dissimilar in almost everything, and the more significant one of them are more than their circumstances. Aksinya at the age of 16 was corrupted by his father. Lara Gishar - her peer - is seduced by her mother's lover

And suddenly the book opened before her: everything became clear.
A.N. Tolstoy. Viper

If Alexander Konstantinovich decides to connect something,
then there is no doubt - will bind.
M.L. Gasparov

1.

Two Nobel novels about the Russian Revolution - “Quiet Don” and “Dr. Zhivago” - are radically dissimilar in almost everything, and the more significant one -of -the -one circumstance, which has still almost not paid attention. Aksinya at the age of 16 was corrupted by the father (Volume 1, part 1, VII ) . Lara Gishar - her peer - is seduced by her mother’s lover.

The exhaustive characteristic of the heroine of this type is given in a letter to Tony to Yuri Zhivago: “I must sincerely admit, she is a good person, but I do not want to twist my soul - the opposite of me. I was born to simplify life and look for the right exit, and it is to complicate it and knock it out of the road. ” This is equally applied to Lara and Axinya - especially taking into account their main plot function: in both novels, the main character personifies Russia, fatal, tragic and irresistibly attractive, skillful in any work, but categorically unable to organize her own fate, make a final choice.

“Quiet Don” and “Dr. Zhivago” with all their dissimilarity are first converted by Nabokov: “Foreign Russians have been reading Soviet novels, carried away by cardboard quiet Donians on the cardboard tails or those lyrical doctors with lubric-mystical calls, philistine speech and Charovnitsa from Char, who brought the Soviet The government is so much solid foreign currency. ”

This mention of all the more curious that the “Lolita” is written on the same plot: Quasinocest (molestation of a stepfather, albeit at an earlier age). Thus, the three most famous Russian novels of the twentieth century are linked into a single metatext, in which in a strange way - and, of course, in addition to the author’s will - there is another repeating element, namely a dead child. Aksinya in the first year after marriage gives birth to a dead child, and Tanya, the daughter of Gregory and Aksinya, dies of Scarlatina. Lolita in marriage with a young cripple gives birth to a dead child and dies herself. As for the daughter of Lara and Yura - Tanya Blagored - she almost became a victim of a cannibal. In Russian epics of the twentieth century, the death of a child is generally an extremely frequent element of the plot: “And in the morning of the third day, Dasha reached for the cradle and pulled her hand away, she felt a cold body. She grabbed him, turned it, - on a high skull, his blond and rare hair stood on end. Dasha screamed wildly. She rushed out of bed to the window: to break, throw it out, not to live ... "I betrayed, betrayed ... I can’t, I can not!" She repeated. Telegin barely held her, laid it. He took the corpse. Dasha said to her husband:

- As long as I slept, death came to him. Understand - his hairs became on end ... One was tormented ... I slept ... ” (A.N. Tolstoy. Walking by torment.)

It will seem to another reader that the interpretation of “Lolita” as a novel about the Russian fate in the twentieth century is attracted by the ears, but Nabokov himself foresaw this parallel and clearly led the reader to this thought. His replica to the "Nobel Prize" of Pasternak is widely known. Pasternak at: “What did I do for the dirty trick? Am I a killer and a villain? I made the whole world cry over the beauty of my land. ” At Nabokov: "What a bad thing I did, and am I a sedenter and villain - I, forcing the world to sob the whole above my poor girl?"

I think that the true meaning of the Lolita will be unclear without the analysis of one stable Nabokov invariant related to the topic of attraction to minors.

2.

Nabokov, despite the reputation of a secretive author, always pulling his nose to the penetrating reader, in the best traditions of Chernyshevsky, about which he wrote with such piercing compassion, an extremely open, frank writer who recalled the original plan of Lolita as follows:

“The first small pulsation of Lolita ran into me at the end of 1939 or at the beginning of 1940, in Paris, on Ryu Boalo, while I was nailed to bed a serious attack of intercostal neuralgia. As far as I remember, the initial chill of inspiration was somehow connected with the newspaper article about the monkey in the Paris Zoo, which, after many weeks of extinct from some scientist, sketched the first drawing, ever performed by the animal: the sketch depicted the lattice of a cell in which the poor beast was enclosed. ”

This message is considered a mystification, since such a note has not yet been found by anyone - but all the more frankly, Nabokov is spent on the most stable motive, namely, about the connection of attraction to a young Lilith with a prison theme, or at least the same plot scheme: the hero hopes to get rid of a many years of intrusive dream, but only worsens his way The situation, driving himself in an even more hopeless prison. For the first time, this topic appears in the poem “Lilith”, where the hero at the sight of his forbidden ideal is ready to exclaim: “Good, I seem to be in paradise!” - So that the satisfaction of a longtime passion turned into a painful deception: "And before everyone painfully I spilled the seed and suddenly realized that I was in hell." The topic of the child and prisons is secondary in the “invitation to the execution”, where the seductive nymph Emmochka arranges an escape to the zincynnat - and takes him out of the camera only in order to bring directly to his father, the head of the prison. For the third time, such development of the topic is easy to find in the “Bend Sinister”, where Marietta, it would seem, on the side of the circle - and, surrendering, promises him a liberation from a long -standing mania, from male loneliness and from the door of GB representatives (“gymnasium brigades”); But in fact, she is an agent of the same GB - and the improvement of the position of the circle is in no way included in her task. Finally, in Lolita, the hero feels the highest freedom with Lolita, overcoming many years of painful dependence on perversion-and to some extent the dependence is really overcome, because the hero loves Lolita and adopted, and pregnant, and even ugly-but he writes his notes in prison, where he expects the court; In some versions, A. Dolinin, say, is proposed to interpret metaphorically, as well as the murder of Kuilty, but even then we have to admit that Gumbert-1954 compared to Gumbert-1946 significantly worsened his position.

This suggests that the “Lolita” plot in general terms echoes the meta -bucket of the Russian revolutionary epic: the realization of the forbidden desire, the secret dream, fatal obsession leads the heroes not to liberation, but to more complete enslavement; He drives them into a dead end, from which there really is no way out.

3.

One of the most significant elements of the Russian revolutionary metasyuster is adultery, treason, and the departure from the unloved, but reliable, hopelessly traditional, to the beloved, but restless and unhappy. This is how Katya’s path from Nikolai Nikolayevich to Roshchin, Aksinya departure from Stepan Astakhov, the flight of Lolita from Humbert to Kuilti (although Kuilti is certainly a parody figure). A very stable element of the plot is the death of the abandoned husband, or at least his without a trace of disappearance (sometimes, as in the case of Stepan, the disappeared hero is resurrected as necessary).

Marital treason is an eternal novel topic, but in the Russian revolutionary metasyuster it is always interpreted as a new choice of Russia, as a departure from tradition to entailing and dangerous novelty. This invariant - the departure from the previous love for ideological motives, and the novelty is not always personified - it can be found in the stories of female revenge for ideological betrayal (“Love Yarovaya”, “Forty -First”), and in narratives about the sudden degeneration of the woman of the Silver Age, which appeared in the form of a tumbling avenger (the real fate of Larisa Reisner, “Optimistic,“ Optimistic. The tragedy ”, and especially, of course,“ spectors ”, where Olga Bayteeva, with whom the hero had a slight romance in the first chapter, is to punish him endless contempt in the seventh, without any guilt on his part).

This stable motive of female revenge - in the case of Pasternak, interpreted precisely as revenge for the scolded femininity - is unusually stable. His echoes can be found in Mary of Babel - where the heroine never appears, since she became the creature of another, superhuman plan. I repeat the assumption already expressed in the book about Pasternak: it is probably easier for the artist to accept the revolution in this form.

And in the life of beauty just

And the life of the beauties covered.

But they were stupefied by lobotyas

And the bastard developed.

……………

Hence our jealousy in us

And our revenge and envy.

The beauty avenging for itself is a more attractive image of the revolution than the “sailor in Moscow” of the same Pasternak; After all the disappointments in the revolution, Pasternak remains faithful to this concept, which allows at least somehow to justify its atrocities, often blind, hence the unfinished play “The Blind Beauty” with the repetition of the same stable motives.

4.

It is curious that in the "viper" A.N. The fatal revolutionary activity of the heroine - the commissioners of Olga Zotova - is also a revenge for rape, failed, however, that in the context of the topic is especially symbolic: “He, curly, in an embroidered shirt, was really Valka, the killer: she was not mistaken ... afraid that she would bring her, he was rushing to stipulate her: the pencil note was his accident ... Valka Brykin was kicked out for hooliganism from the gymnasium, he left for the front and a year later appeared in Kazan, flaunting the Ulan form and soldier George. Valka was always hungry, greedy to pleasure and dare, like a devil. The war taught his grasps, he learned that the blood smells of sour, and only the revolution untied his hands. " Valka, who killed his father and mother Zotova and did not manage to rape her, is naturally a supporter of the white, and the true and eternal love of Olga Zotova - Commissar Valentinov, the liberator. True, the hero of Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “February” also acts in the functions of the same liberator - not so platonic: there he breaks into a brothel, where he discovers his teenage love - and immediately takes possession of her in the hope, so to speak, sexual rehabilitation: “Maybe my night seed fertilizes your desert.” It is terrible that the motive of a dead child also appears here: with the “February” the poem of the same Bagritsky “death of the pioneer” is adjacent. The child in the new era is practically doomed, as evidenced and at the same time written Platonov's “foundation pit”.

In the meta -coot of the Russian Revolution, there is another stable motive for the secret patron that saves the protagonist in extreme situations - the most obvious here, of course, is Evgraf Zhivago, the secret of the power of which "remained unceleless." This motive allows you to include in the complex of texts the fourth famous Russian novel - “Masters and Margarita”, where there are at least three stable components: this is a betrayal (with the departure from an unloved, immediately disappearing from the text), a mysterious patron (Woland in the case of a master) and a dead child (in the history of Frida). Frida’s function in this novel is double: she not only demonstrates that mercy “sometimes completely unexpectedly and insidiously penetrates into the most narrow cracks”, but also refers to the Gretchen line into the “Faust”, thereby indicating the most important prototype of the Russian revolutionary meta -co -lawsuits. This prototype is all the more important that the Goethe Margarita, as it were, breaks up into Margarita Nikolaevna and the unfortunate Frida - and Margarita Nikolaevna frees her own second “I”, which has so tragically died in the previous incarnation. (This bifurcation of the original, classic character in a certain sense coincides with the bifurcation of Christ, which, according to the brilliant guess of A. Mirra in the book “Ethics of Mikhail Bulgakov”, as if disintegrates into Pilate - the image of fair power - and Yeshua - the image of absolute good.)

About how “Faust” was reflected in the Russian revolutionary metasyust - both in reality and in the literature - we could write a separate study. But the Russian revolutionary plot has another direct predecessor, where almost all topics have already been declared: a related (incestoose) corruption - in the seventeenth year! - A dead child, revenge on the seducer and leaving for a new man who personifies a new life. I am talking about the “resurrection”, direct references to which there are in the “Dr. Zhivago” and in “Walking through the torment” - A.N.'s favorite fragment Tolstoy was the head of the XXXVIII first part, and he asked Kachalov by heart to read it aloud, according to the memoirs of I.L. Andronikova. Katyusha consists with Nekhlyudov in kinship, albeit not literally: she is a pupil of his aunts.

Probably in the “Quiet Don” - especially in the stylistic dissonance between his “novel” and “historical” chapters - we can find the influence of the last Tolstoy novel. The metasyust of the Russian novel of the twentieth century was determined by Tolstoy with frightening clarity: Katyusha personifies Russia, which the intelligentsia corrupted, and in the end the “revolutionaries of the new type” represented by Simonson. I think that such a rough and direct interpretation does not contradict the idea of ​​a symbolist novel - which is undoubtedly “resurrection”. The metasyust of the revolutionary epic, thus, is determined with absolute clarity: early corruption - by the father or stepfather - is read as the metaphor of direct violence of the “former power”. The departure to the beloved promises freedom, but it turns even more, even more hopeless lack of freedom. The fruit born of lawless love - a new society, a new generation - is not viable.

5.

Since the metasyust of the Russian Revolution is underneath and is regularly reproduced-due to the fact that the power in cyclic Russian history cuts off all other options for the development of events-a purely philological question becomes vital for today's Russia: could this metassuri be formed differently? Do he have other development options? Can a child in the end survive?

Surprisingly, Russian literature also gives an answer to this question. The fate of the parents, of course, is always tragic: Aksinya is dying, the 40-year-old Yuri Zhivago dies, Grigory Melekhov is doomed, the fate of the specttorsky and Bayteeva is predetermined, and it is also better not to relax with their Roshchin and Telegin; But the Soviet metasyust continues with a whole series of books about street children, and Tanka Bezraredeva, the daughter of Lara and Yura, does not just get into the orphanage. Parents are doomed, and the children have nowhere to go, especially since the gap between fathers and children is described in the previous metatex - manor, also waiting for a systematic study. It is collective education as the main Soviet utopia that appears among different authors as Belykh and Panteleev (“Republic of Shkik”), Makarenko (“Pedagogical Poem”) and Strugatsky (“Noon, XXII century”). The only successful Russian pedagogical utopia was the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, from where the students did not even go on vacation. In all likelihood, without a well -built - and already thought out now - the pedagogical utopia of collective education, the Russian revolutionary project by non -parties. Pushkin also guessed about something like this: “In Russia, home education is the most insufficient, most immoral; The child is surrounded by hornholds, sees only vile examples, self -willed or slave, does not receive any concepts of justice, about the mutual relations of people, about the true honor. Education in private boarding houses is not much better; Here and there it ends at the age of 16. There is nothing to hesitate: by all means, the private education should suppress. ”

I understand how strange and at first glance a similar conclusion is unable. But the connection between the metaroman of the Silver Age and the Soviet pedagogical utopia is obvious: the doomed parents, crashed under the weight of the coup, leave the historical scene. The commune of Makarenko is not a mandatory and not the only way, no one offers to seize children from parents and put in lyceums, but without great pedagogical projects, without teachers like Soroki-Rosinsky or Makarenko, without a school named after Dostoevsky or Kuryazhi commune, where children are occupied by real production-nothing will work out. The communal technique, with all its sectarianism, was a step in the right direction. The continuation of the Russian metasyuster was the “flags on the towers” ​​- although the Russian Plutovsk Roman, whose heroes began to avoid participating in a new life, became the other branch of this plot. Their adventures are fascinating, but the fate is joyless. If new public cataclysms happen in Russia - which, of course, I would really not want to, - teachers, educators, theorists of new utopias will have to save it. Otherwise, every “February” will end in the “death of a pioneer”, and Yura’s love and Lara will inevitable the return of Komarovsky.

Русский революционный метароман не закончен, и дописывать его, хотим мы того или нет, предстоит нам.