Return to freedom

The holiday season ... This time for me-quite unexpectedly-it is impressed by the work of Vladimir Korolenko-the Russian "writer-democrat" (1853–1921), as he was called in Soviet literary criticism. In the picturesque area-at the Huttor farm in the Poltava region -at the Korolenko dacha, the local enterprise of organic agriculture "Agroecology" and the Poltava Literary and Memorial Museum of the Writer are organized every year and, under the combination of the visiting cultural and scientific public and local residents, celebrate the birthday of Vladimir Galaktionovich. Of the speeches that sounded from the veranda, from my conversations for a common feast - with employees of the Korolenko Museum, with the scientists who studied the journalists who wrote about him - I learned many unexpected details that removed the "textbook gloss" from the appearance of the writer.

The Democrat Writer, it turns out, was a cyclist! Korolenko rode a bicycle along Poltava and in the country in huts - in particular, by mail for a dozen kilometers to the great Sorochintsy. Moreover, they say he came to the cottage on a bicycle - 85 kilometers! - And it seems even together with his wife. Finded by this, I drove a bicycle from Korolenko’s house in Poltava to his cottage in the huts - and I can categorically say: Korolenko, and even more so his wife , is already elderly, already elderly, on the then heavy bicycles, in uncomfortable clothes - could not overcome this distance with a lot of protracted elevations and descents.

What do we remember about Korolenko? That he is the author of the novels "Blind Music" and "Children of the Dungeon" and the winged (including literally) phrases "A person was born for happiness, like a bird for a flight", enriching the humanistic rhetoric and a set of Soviet slogans. But who remembers the excellent story "Sokolinets" , about which Chekhov said: "He was written as a good musical composition"? With new interest, even to the excitement, I plunged into the texts of Korolenko-at the table in the writer’s office in his cottage: restored in 2003, she turns into the house of creativity by the efforts of the founder of “agroecology” , 80-year-old Academician Semyon Antonz and his daughter Antonina.

It seemed to me that extreme conscientiousness and humanity made Korolenko socially superbly, and this supermotivation prevented him from literary work. “People die innocently, a flagrant business is being done, and I can’t think about anything else” - Korolenko in a letter of October1895 ; Alas, the "committing egregious affairs" around Korolenko pursued all his life, and, it seems, it was it that prematurely brought him to the grave . The soreness of social problems "stunned" (in every sense of the word) his imagination, restrained verbal delights. Moreover, mercilessly and caustically, Korolenko criticized socially non -angid literary modernism, which has closely critical realism, in a review of the "story of miracles in the lattice of Almquist and Sonata Strindberg." The social burden of artistic prose also constrained the sense of humor Korolenko: it manifests itself only sometimes - a small bar, a half, a fleeting glimpse. He gave free rein to his sense of humor only in the fairy tale "Wait, the sun, and do not move, the moon!" -Reading how the governor was obsolete, fearing the end of his reign, he forbade the passage of time, called for the power of the non-mogil-mogyl coin and took a circular defense against spring, I involuntarily thought about the heiress of the country in which Korolenko wrote this fairy tale.

But what restrained, limited Korolenko as a master of fiction, turned out to be his great dignity as a writer of literature of real life. I recalled someone's advice to those who want to know more about the era and the country: to read it not of its most famous writers, but those who are more modest, from the “second row”: they more precisely, more fully convey life and morals. It is no coincidence that contemporaries called the decade of the most active literary and social activity of the writer "era Korolenko."

I am writing these lines in the spacious attic-Kabinet Korolenko at his dacha, with a view of the valley of the Psel River, smoothly flowing to the Dnieper under a cloudless sky, is a marvelous picture of harmony! - In five hundred kilometers east, Ukrainians, Russians, Buryats, Chechens die ... The horror of the collapse of the Russian Empire continues

Here, for example, the beginning of Korolenko’s note “Stereotypical in the life of a Russian writer. To the necrologist of the gr. E. A. Salias” : “When a Russian writer dies, no matter what caliber he is, he, like any defendant at the trial, is probably the question of the question:“ Was it in hard labor? In the settlement in Siberia? Under trial? In prison? Did he refer administratively? Or, at least, was it under the supervision of the police, obvious or secret? ”And the rare of our fraternity can, it is on the heart, reply: he was not on hard labor, he was not under trial and a consequence, under a clear and secret supervision. Such a criminal profession.”

The following is the story of Saliasa de Tustemir-“Count, an aristocrat, a censor, generally a“ completely reliable person. ”During the unrest at Moscow University in 1861, he was elected to a delegation of three students and awarded the passing“ to the highest name. ”The next day of Salias was accepted by the chief of the gendarmes, Prince Dolgoruky,“ already elderly and favorable, ”in the same way. He scolded and released the student unrest “to naughty” the university, made a successful, well-meaning career, having served to the “Member of the Committee of Foreign Affairs in St. Petersburg and, finally, the managing office of the imperial theaters” was complained by Russian citizenship and the rank The years of successful loyal career, stopping in the province of the Governor-bypass, to learn from the stunned householder who received the guest secret paper-that he, the count and the court adviser, is under the secret supervision of the police. In detective institutions. "

Korolenko recalls that Pushkin (this is "our everything") "was less happy and was considered unreliable almost half a century after his death." And only when the newly -appointed gendarmes chef, General Mezenets, demanded that the lists of supervised for viewing and found “dead souls”, including Pushkin, “ordered to clear lists of unreliable persons from dead writers so that they remains more expanse alive.” What a killer-irony, almost Shchedrin ending!

“Those times,” Korolenko writes, “there were much better than ours. Now this fateful stamp deprives branded fire and water, blocks him access to any state -owned service, forces the gentlemen of the governors to“ not assert ”the candidate for the Zemskaya service, but sometimes even drives the private road, leaving the torna road only to emigration or illegal.” A useful reminder to those who, tracing the genealogy of the Soviet and post-Soviet “organs” of the Politsysk and repressions, is limited to the triad of punitive “KGB-OGPU-OGKU“ the country ”of the victorious socialism,” and for some reason forget about their predecessors in the Russian Empire, which Soviet and post-Soviet gendarmers brought to the whole and distributed to the whole country.

By the way, Korolenko himself wrote about this in a letter to Gorky shortly before his death in 1921: “Yes, not a funny time at all. I once asked a comrade of the chairman of the All-Ukrainian Physics, meeting me in Poltava Ch.K., where, at that time, I went almost daily-“ What is your impression, Vl. [Adimir] [Adimir] Gal. [Actionovich]? "I answered the truth that if the gendarmes had the right to not only exile, but also to shoot us administratively ( that is, without trial and investigation, only by the decision of officials. - S. M. ), then this would be the same thing that is happening before our eyes. - but this, V. G., for the good of the people! - I expressed a strong doubt so that even such were suitable for the good of the people. Means ".

Another interesting feature of Korolenko: although it is opposition to the political structure of the Russian Empire, nevertheless, it is a worldview of imperial. The democrat in its purest form (and that fighting for his beliefs and human rights, including the equality of the rights of nationalities, energetically, persistently, at the cost of risk for health and life, arrests, prisons, links, “bruises on the fingers”), Korolenko is alien to some national feelings. That is why his essay Kotlyarevsky and Mazepa, about the incident worthy of the pen of the “auditor”, sounds especially significant, objective evidence of the state of the “Ukrainian question”.

Who is Kotlyarevsky? This "... a small and ... quite well -being official ( " trustee of the godless establishments "Poltava. - S. M. ), whose merits were modestly encouraged by the Russian government. But in his heart, love for the Ukrainian" peasant "speech. He began to write in a language that was spoken by the population of the whole land, but which did not have ( modern. - S. M. ). The soft, expressive, strong, rich language of literary language, and Ukrainian speech, which was considered only local dialect, sounded so loudly with his light hand that its sounds spread throughout Russia. " "He is the author of" Natalka Poltavka ", which is widely popular far beyond the borders of Ukraine, and the" Aeneids "( the National Burlesque and Testament Poem based on the epic of Virgil.-S. M. ), which is often cited by people who do not know the Ukrainian language ...". In short, Ivan Kotlyarevsky is the founder of the new Ukrainian literature and the modern Ukrainian literary language, for which the Poltava dialect was adopted.

And “grateful Ukraine-on the initiative of Poltava self-government-erected a monument to the poet, from the proper, of course, the permission of the authorities. The highest authorities,” Korolenko explains, at that time nothing against the complacency, in Ukrainian, in Ukrainian, who wrote such cute and quite harmless things in Ukrainian. ” In 1903, representatives of the Ukrainian intelligentsia from Russia and Austria-Hungary, where millions of Ukrainians lived, arrived at the opening of the monument, at the “triumph of Ukrainian speech” in 1903. "Russian", as Korolenko says, "Poltava became the center of pilgrimage to the Galician intelligentsia, the speaker, writing, student and student in Ukrainian."

The program has a meeting at the Gogol City Theater. "It could have been foreseen that at the festival of the Ukrainian word and speech there would be Ukrainian." However, "local representatives of the bureaucracy ... turned out to be taken by surprise." The governor was on vacation; Vice-Governor Fonvizin-by irony, a descendant of the famous writer-was officially attended by the monument ... then he “prudently” left so as not to show excessive participation in the honor of the poet’s memory, who wrote in the “Mazepa language”. Before that, whispering the mayor (“Honored, but to the Comism of a respectable and cowardly”) that it "Ukrainian speeches for Russian subjects are inconvenient."

The first at the gala meeting in the theater were guests from abroad: "The Galicians spoke smoothly, beautifully and freely. It was clear that abroad, in Austria, Kotlyarevsky’s speech and Shevchenka had long become an instrument of the public, scientific and political word, an instrument of cultural struggle for independence ... But only the same Ukrainian speech was heard from the mouth of Russian, not Austrian, Ukrainians, Ukrainians, city heads. Immediately, the representatives of it were forbidden to read the addresses ... of the Russian Ukraine with ready -made addresses ... Immediately, the poor mannequin, dancing on the thread of the city administration, interrupted it and repeated the template prohibition, instead of the celebration Homeland, in his cradle, he is prohibited. " The then Russian press mainly reacted to this episode “with the feelings of bitterness and condemnation”, as well as “to the further manifestations of the same vandalism ... In the following years in the form of closing educational institutions, newspapers and magazines in Ukrainian and announcements of the“ fuel oil ”of the most legal elementary aspirations of Ukrainians.” Korolenko completes the article prophetically: this "administrative absurdity ... may become an epigraph for a whole political strip, creating its gloomy precedents, contrary to more competent, benevolent and reasonable promises."

So it, alas, turned out. And now, when I write these lines, sitting in the spacious attic-cabinet of Korolenko at his dacha, with a view of the vast valley of the Psel River, smoothly flowing to the Dnieper under a cloudless light blue sky, is a marvelous picture of rest, harmony, peace! - In five hundred kilometers, Ukrainians, Russians, Buryats, Chechens are dying east ... The insanity and horror of the collapse of the Russian Empire continues. And here are the words of Korolenko: “Again, I repeat: we need to return to freedom. Much has already been spoiled, but if we can return us to the likeness of the previous well -being, then only a return to freedom. First of all to freedom of trade. Then to the freedom of print, freedom of opinion ... if possible for Russia, then it is only in one thing: in return to freedom.”

Sergey Mirny - Kyiv writer, ecologist, film science