"The sinister angel soars over me"

Tom Stoppard has a play about the possible and incredible meeting of Joyce, Lenin and Tzars in Zurich in 1916. It is most often useful to follow such inventions. Then, in the same Zurich, the Dublin exile could see a girl on the street - a “embroidered and old child”, if you recall Jakomo Joyce’s words about his fleeting beloved student Amalia. Most likely, the Zurich girl was accompanied by adults, but they were not parents, but the guardians - the family Vyu. Parents were in the very heart of the Russian Revolution, and they were among those who have forced this heart. Since 1901, Joseph Edelman and Maria small published in circulations of 50–80 thousand copies of Marxist, popular science, atheistic brochures for workers. In 1909, Maria small fled directly from the courtroom to Europe, there she gave birth to a daughter Eric (Ernestine) on December 4, 1910.

Our heroine equally spoke in French and Russian, breathed the air of modernism in Zurich and finally arrived in 1925 in Soviet Leningrad. Before her arrival, her father died, the younger brother was very sick since childhood, and the elder was listed as missing in the civil war. Further, life is like a novel: Boris appeared four years later in Baku, he was called by Nikolai Voronkin (ran from the whites to the red), served in the Red Army, and started his family. Later he tried to engage in commerce (in the 30s!), I went to prison, died at the front in January 1943.

Zhukovsky "admitted" that once Erica, looking at the portrait of Stalin, said: "How I am afraid of him, how I hate, I would be ready to kill him"

I will return to Eric, who is studying in a Soviet school ("everything is bad, all rude, dirty"), is engaged in drawing, and most importantly, through Alexander Razumovsky (family friend, co -author of Igor Bakhterev ), he meets the Oberiuts. Harms mentioned her in the diaries ("Eric Smart Girl") and devoted two poems to her ("Human Life in the Wind" and "In the Album Eric"), Bakhterev - one ("The Quiet from the Pies"). Bakhterev, however, commented on him with a remark that Eric was shot only because she was the bride of the adjutant Tukhachevsky. In fact, Eric Edelman, who graduated from the Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute in 1935, worked as an engineer in the Teplomontazh Trust in Moscow, was married to her head Yuri Kirpichnikov (this is her third marriage). In 1937, everything collapsed: they shot her father -in -law, drove off her husband as a son of an “enemy of the people” (“everyone staggered from him like a plague”), Eric was arrested in October. On December 10, she was found guilty under the 58th article (paragraphs 10 and 11, "Participant of the counter-revolutionary organization") and shot after three days. The reason for the repression was the testimony of the destroyed month earlier than her Leningrad friend (and before - lover) Mikhail Zhukovsky. He served at the Institute of Applied Physics, but he was connected with Tukhachevsky "in the line of inventive work." Zhukovsky "admitted" that once Erica, looking at the portrait of Stalin, said: "How I am afraid of him, as I hate, I would be ready to kill him. "

Eric Edelman, like many others, including Zhukovsky, was rehabilitated in 1956. In the late 80s of her daughter, Tatyana Zapustelova, a “charming philosopher girl”, a specialist in Chinese art, was returned to the mother’s diary that she kept in 1929–31, which was read by investigators who noted anti-Soviet free-thinking.

This diary, now published by beautiful philologists from the Pushkin house, is remarkable for a number of reasons.

Erica spent half his life in Switzerland, she had something to compare the Soviet everyday life

Firstly, the reader is a certificate of times and places. Erica spent half his life in Switzerland, she had something to compare Soviet everyday life, the geography of her diary was impressive: Zurich, Lausanne, Berlin, Leningrad, Baku, Tiflis, Khabarovsk, Birobidzhan, Blagoveshchensk. "Eric Smart Girl" admired Thting and Dostoevsky, listened to Wagner in Zurich and Verdi in Leningrad, critically evaluated the socialist realism of Eugene Onegin and Red Mac. Everywhere she is outraged by human meanness (“everyone rejoices, if anyone else has comprehended misfortune”), but in a Soviet country, where “a coffin is digging themselves”, she sees fertile ground for vile shoots: “And this is a deception that seizes a whole country, I don’t understand and why, when everyone clearly feels that he is forced and he does not dare to resist. That more we do not have a person on its own, that he is a car, not even a car, but only a small part. "

Erica Edelman and Igor Bakhterev (?)

Secondly, Erica’s diary is a “human document”, notes of her mother’s daughter: Maria Malykh actively fought for female rights. Erica Edelman grew up an emancipated woman: “And there is nothing just comrades of love and jealousy. I will become an engineer. I like working all the cars so why get married. I can’t take my life together, I see 2 married brothers that these are endless scandals tears of kisses, etc. Yes, there are no children unbearable.” Perhaps she perceived the relations of men and women, as Ibsen described them (Remember Joyce again) and Strindberg, and sometimes felt like a volunteer of the War of the Grinds: “But I wanted to meet a person stronger than me, but for this I needed to become weak in different ways to close my eyes and allow me to take over my strength, but that day when I say it is more and more, I return” strong than it was. "

Thirdly, the diary of a 20-year-old girl is the story of a “hot heart”, a bifurcated soul: suffering and genius, pessimism and madness, ignorance and discoveries. She accepted her life as pain: “I was happy and unhappy with me always so when I could be happy, I do the unhappy I cry ... How I was indifferent to all these people dancing and laughing under me. I would like a sudden“ fire ”and see the horror of all these people then I would laugh” (see similar children's memories). Eric Edelman was naughty the world around the world before the Sartrean Rokanten. Her fate is one endless flight of small and wonderful heroines Modiano. She falls in her age, like from the window of the Parisian attic, as the poetess-self-like girl Herte Creftner seemed, whose life was also broken by advice. And Erica usually felt like a melankt Herbert from the story of Stein: “As a melankt, as if they were beaten from the inside to bruises and to the blood ... Sometimes the melankt thought whether it was better to take and commit suicide at all, because sometimes it seemed to her that this was the best way out for her.”

Erica writes as if the monologue of Penelope was composed by Nora Joyce

Fourth, the diary of 1929–31 is "The History of my two beautiful novels." In essence, the reader is faced with modernist prose, and it was not by chance that I began with the mention of Joyce. Erica writes as if Nora Joyce composed a monologue of Penelope. The degree of the experiment increases the bilingualism of Erica, which makes us recall the "pasta" poems of European Latinists, Madame Kurdyukov, Madame Kurdyukov, and the "Finneganized commemoration" of Joyce himself.

The first beautiful novel was Swiss love: “I lived the happiest minutes with Willy how I loved him, I loved to be in his arms, I loved to kiss him and all the suffering gave the unheard of my love. I am shuddered by the terrible days of despair when Willy was angry, it was death and how I loved him and for what? His suffering. The bourgeois households of lovers were frapped and, taking advantage of Erica's suicide, sent her to Russia.

The second beautiful novel was the Far Eastern marriage with the flight by train, care and return: “I am not alone, there is a friend and husband of Shura. I won’t find it better. I could be so beautiful with him. All our days that we spent, they seem so sweet, warm, although we cursed very much, and the slightest desire of both sides returned, everything instantly returned calmness, everything instantly returned calm Yes, yes, our relationship was original. " I hope the reader will appreciate the game with grammatical times that Eric has started in this fragment. Shura was called engineer Alexander Straelov (1903–1957), the father of her only daughter.

With Switzerland, Eric said goodbye to a psychiatric clinic, where she prophetically wrote in a diary that she would have killed herself better if she could look into the future. "Deep and dark night has been surrounding me for a whole year now a glimpse of light or star. When my <

Eric Edelman. Diary 1929–1931/ Publication by Yu. Valieva, Translation by N. Dmitrieva with the participation of B. Steinlukht and I. Potapova // Yearbooks of the manuscript department of the Pushkin house for 2015 and 2016 . - St. Petersburg: Dmitry Bulanin, 2016–2017.