"Gift" -2: the wing hit

The publication in the last issue of the Zvezda magazine of the second part of Dara is important and it will be important not for five years and six years, as it is quoted in the text, but as long as there is a Cyrillic alphabet (and maybe longer). The fact that in the language of the preface is the “long way to the reader” of a pink notebook containing published fragments is described in the articles of professional nabovedians is a really exciting story. But in the footsteps of fresh reading - and the unread hits for us approximately like the newly open play by Shakespeare would be for English -speaking - I would like to say about something else.

From the point of view of universal interest, the novel “Gift” completes the Russian literature of the first row, enclosing it in himself (his heroine is not Zina, but Russian literature, honestly warns the author). So the “Master and Margarita” completes the Russian literature of the second row, containing the “Laphatovskoye populist” , “demons”, “temptic” Zagoskin and all Brockhaus and Efron at once. These two, a nobleman and son of a priest (the second and first estates, if you continue to get involved in numerological), are the last Russian writers, after them something else began.

The fact that the author in the “feat” on behalf of Martyn is unkindly speaks of Archibald Moon, we can say about his own last Russian novel: “Russia was slowly stolen by Archibald Moon and locked in his office. He liked her completeness. It was colored with blue water and a transparent purple of Pushkin’s poems. For two years now, he wrote her story in English, hoped to put all her in one thick volume. ”

Such living monuments - or, more precisely, sacred memorial groves - are born in great literature. So, “in search of lost time” completes a thousand -year France. Here is fate: a poor sick, pale spider, locked in a hand -in -aircraft box, pulls a thread and builds a Gothic cathedral about the seven spiers, an unwanted, frightening, impeccable, overwhelming all his homeland, from the barbaric kings to the damned poets, all its writers, all the topics of its incomparable literature, Paris, the province and coast, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy, aristocracy The bourgeoisie and the peasantry, French and Jews. In the seventh spire, lightning strokes - the First World War - and completes the epic, exploding the cathedral in the commander with its stained glass and tombstones. The author, in a completely literal sense, having given himself to his work, he dies no earlier than he finishes the seventh volume.

Our author was to survive his work and write the second part of the diptych - English -speaking prose. From the point of view of his individual writing fate, as has already been noted, all that was written further grew from one way or another from the “gift”. Reading what remains of the second part allows us to understand to what extent this is true. As you know, two whole texts were borne from the plan of the “Dara”: “Ultima Tule”, where the widower communicates with the medium, trying to reach the dead wife, and “Solus Rex” , where the same widower is comforting, creating a ghostly northern kingdom in his imagination, where the depraved prince rules, where the Queen of Belinda rules the second time - it is unsuccessful. Resurrected wife. “Ultima Tule” is the future “transparent things”, “Solus rex” is a “pale flame”. The third strange branch of the “gift”, whose kinship with the main text is visible precisely when reading the second part is a “wizard”, a story about the unsuccessful pedophile, Nucleus “Lolita”.

In the second part of the “gift” Fedor and Zina live in a poor, terrible Paris - “in that second -rate Paris that floats with light roll in the mirrors of taverns, not merging in any way with Paris French, motionless and impenetrable.” The forty-year-old gloomy Fedor begins to meet with a young prostitute, has two dates with her, Zina suddenly and instantly perishes under the car, the widower, without waiting for the funeral, leaves south, is sleeping with some random acquaintance (“Anyway to your whole life”), and then returns to Paris, where the airplane is finally full-with the poet Koncheev, whom he reads. His continuation of the Pushkin’s “mermaid” - of course, is a poem about the deceased, which the hero first lived with the light, and then tries to return the ways dangerous for reason.

Neither the adultery, nor the abyss of the war came up to the scale of Nabokov’s talent and the handwriting of his fate.

By the most brief retelling, it can be seen how dried this plan was sucked in order to give the life of a new English -speaking prose. The scenes with Ivonn almost unchanged entered the Lolita, Charlotte Geiz went suddenly under the wheels, a dull craving for the young flourished the irreversible staller orchid of the Humbert Perversion. It is important here: it cannot be said that the remaining from the “gift” -2 is “poorly written”-firstly, the text is too fragmented and uneven in terms of processing, and secondly, what is left is well written. But it’s impossible not to say - and here the amateur, dressed up by the “simple reader,” can afford that seven professionals will not dare to - that all the same in “Lolita” came out much, much stronger and better. Moreover, the author knew this in advance, and precisely because he disassembled his text to the organs with a non -backing hand.

In order for the scene of a meeting with a prostitute to look touching, it should be surrounded by an atmosphere of innocence, and not an atmosphere of guilt. He does not occupy anyone, as a sad uncle of middle -aged years is cheating on his wife. But Monica is the most innocent of the adventures of Humbert, and therefore her dirty nails, wrapping in the curtain and the prospect of buying stockings are so touched by the reader. In the Russian context, all this was loaded with an unbearable suitcase of family misfortune and drowned.

So that the scene of the sudden death of his wife is heartbreaking, it should be an unloved wife, which married something from an unknown self-interest and in which he saw an obstacle to this self-interest, and suddenly the obstacle is eliminated, and the nimble devil opens you a barrier to hell (a pleading abyss is a through Nabokovo motif), and the hero knows that this is the road to hell, but not, but not, but not, but not to go to hell, but, but And then his terrible fault lies with him with complete weight. And if Soulmate Zina died, whatever temporary mutual understanding with her, then all the almost wine is removed by the abandoned by its own misfortune, and the artistic effect is also removed with it. Not to mention the fact that all this was already in the “return of Chorba”, including the departure of a desperate widower to the funeral - the author was then young and allowed himself simple effects, always ineffective.

And in order to describe what the publisher Andrei Babikov in his introductory article calls “Joyy”, and this would have turned out expressively, and had artistic value, and bypassed all the obvious Scylles and Haribda, standing in the way of this literary task, oh, science, as Mephistofel sighed.

At the same time, another writer, Bunin, solved the same problem. What did he do? He - with some help of Russian history of the twentieth century - killed all the heroes in advance, and with them the entire universe of their habitat. It turned out sex on the last day of Pompeii, although Pompeyans themselves did not yet know, and thus what was happening gained proper significance, being illuminated by this beam of rock falling a posteriori . This is a working method, but he did not fit Nabokov, although he also married Eros and Tanatos, but not as the main motive. His way is to raise what is happening to the theater podium of crime: not just a Parisian bird that sees its “eighteen”, but a canarye in the claws of a temporarily quiet pervert, and then “ten years of hard labor, if you show her that you look at her” (the hero receives much more in the finale - but he has done more). The same is in “ADA”: not just lovers, even minors (everything is by mutual agreement, which greatly reduces drama), but his brother and sister, Enfants Maudits , damned children. You can bribe a receptionist, but you can not bribe a whole culture, as Father Wan Wine rightly notes.

The most important thing is this: the second part of the “gift” was written, apparently, in the year 39-40 in France, before the Nabokovs left to America, at the lower point of the biography of the author personally and Europe as a whole. In it is heard the tone of a grave disgust for being, for Nabokov it is not only an uncharacteristic, but directly contrary to all the construction of his talent. His happy Pronoye clearly began to change him - the flight from Germany did not lead to a new life, but only to the need for a new flight, all appeals for university work in America or England received refusals, poverty was indescribable, unimaginable, hopeless. “The shadow discarded by the fool-History” can also not be described, and so it is clear.

On the so-called personal front (stamped humor is more to the place, as O. Henry would say), some extremely uncharacteristic for the author took place-and never repeated his long life-a misfortune with Verina to the azure coast and a dreary novel with Irina Guadanini, from which, then, then, then, a sense of Nina from the “phiant” and focus and focus ” Nina from Sebastian Knight. In its purest form, all this was not suitable for literature either as a background, or as a material-“The tragedy of a Russian writer”, as in addition of quotation marks, it was written in “Gift” -2, there is no rummage of broken. It was too large for popular tragedies of this kind on no matter what a smoky historical back they developed. Neither the adultery (the banal way to rise above banality, as he will say later in a lecture on Flaubert), nor the abyss of the war came up to the scale of his talent and the handwriting of his fate. He returned his faith to himself, got to the New World and wrote what he had to write.

The best that will remain in the sketches of the “Dara” -2 is the description of the aged Godunov-Cherdyntsev: “Whatever it is in his youth, it was now large, almost a burly, forty-year-old man with thick, gestured, short-cut hair and rough pink on the neck and cheeks. Heavy, scattered, wolf, iridescent and evasive shine in dark eyes, strangely stretched skin of the forehead, wild whiteness of the teeth and a hump of a fine-winged nose, and most importantly, the general expression of strengthening, arrogance and some mocking sadness, usually impressing almost repulsive to a fresh person, who was crazy about his books, from his mind, from his mind. Dara ".

It is interesting that the “wonderful false teeth” acquired the author himself just in America, and the description itself clearly refers not so much to Nabokov or Godunov-Cherdyntsev as to the writer Vladimirov: “Under his jacket he had a sports sweater with an orange-black border in the neckline, the decline of hair on the sides of the forehead exaggerated its size, a large nose was a large nose, which was called, it was called, it was called. With bone, unpleasantly glistened gray-yellow teeth from under a slightly raised lip, his eyes looked smartly and indifferently-it seems that he studied at Oxford and was proud of his pseudobitan searches. He was already the author of two novels, excellent in strength and speed of the mirror syllable, annoying Fedor Konstantinovich because it may have felt some kind of relationship with him. As an interlocutor, Vladimirov was unattractive to oddity. ” The "gift" is full of these mirror shadows of the hero-both Vladimirov, and a parody Shirin, and a friend-span of Koncheev. And Fedor himself, of course, is not the author, although of all the Nabokov protagonists he is closest to the creator, because he is more generously endowed with literary talent. It is incomprehensible about Fedora-2-whether his gift died down, whether he became an embittered Bunin gentleman (among other things, the scenes with Ivonn show us a dangerous border, beyond which the terrible “dark alleys” are already openly open, that was pacing their slurred misfortunes between the replacement of the wordless concubines. But no - the muscles of the Muse were still too strong, they were enough for a transatlantic flight and an inter -sized transition, unprecedented in world literature.