Tolstoye chimeras

Born by a satirist, Alexei Tolstoy took the revolution as a collapse of the meaning of life, and not just the onset of temporary inconvenience. His previous attitudes turned into chimeras, and he tried to carry them through the tragedy of history. Did the writer succeed? Thinks Boris Paramonov

Ivan Tolstoy: The conversation of lovers of the Russian word today will turn out in absentia, because Boris Mikhailovich will talk about my recently published book “Himers and Tragedy”. And I will answer him quotes from my book. So we decided to distribute our roles.

So, the name "Chimeras and Tragedy", subtitle - "Five Essays about Alexei Tolstoy." The book was published in St. Petersburg by the Publishing House of the Russian Christian Humanitarian Academy.

Boris Paramonov: Literature historian, Radio officer, Liberty, Ivan Tolstoy, published the book “Himers and Tragedy” - five essays about Alexei Tolstoy. The grandson writes about his grandfather - he and the cards in his hands. The same essay are distributed like this. The title part - “Himers and Tragedy” - about the history of the novel “Sisters” - the first in the trilogy “Walking through the torment” - a very difficult story, because this book was written and printed in exile, where Alexey Tolstoy found himself in 1919, but did not stay for long - four years. By the time of returning to the USSR - the summer of 1923 - this was the latest composition of the writer, and in order to appear before the new Soviet reader, bypassing censorship, he had to correct the book, cleansing it from any non -impaired topics, thoughts and phrases.

People who know this work of Alexei Tolstoy well - perhaps the most popular among readers - of course, the amendment made by the author literally in the last phrase of the novel will be striking: Katya and Roshchin walk along the street, and a sticker of the posters moves in front of them, which suddenly turned to them face. The Soviet editions say that his burning eyes turned to them, but in the primary this detail was different - the failed nose of syphilitics: a very expressive code, which opens the further walks of the torment of Tolstoy heroes. We agree that this is a significant amendment. Write Alexei Tolstoy your trilogy in exile, we would have in many respects another book, there is no doubt about it. Question: Would it be better? It is impossible to answer this question with confidence: Tolstoy was a writer completely extra -narological, if you like, unprincipled, he was not interested in thoughts, but paints and living details of being.

I was happy to re -read in the quotation of Ivan Tolstoy that scene when at the beginning of the fourteenth war, the reporter Antoshka Arnoldov takes an interview from an officer of the General Staff.

Ivan Tolstoy: "The head of the seal department of the General Staff, Colonel Solntsev, accepted Antoshka Arnoldov in his office and courtly listened to him, looking into his eyes with clear, convex, cheerful eyes. Antoshka prepared to meet some miracle bogar, with the lion's face of the general-a scourge of a free press, but an elegant, ruddy person was sitting in front of him And he did not wheezed, and did not growl with the bass, and did not prepare anything to put pressure and suppress - all this was poorly knitting with the usual presentation of the royal mercenaries.

Antoshka Arnoldov lowered his notebook and looked at the colonel in bewilderment. Just behind him, the dark figure of Nicholas the first, looking at the spokesman of the press, looked at him, just wanting him to say: a short jacket, yellow shoes, his nose in a sweat, the appearance of the vile one, you are afraid, the son of a bitch ... Both had the same eyes, but that was formidable, and this has funny. "

Short jacket is short, yellow shoes, nose in sweat, vile view - you are afraid, bitch son ...

Boris Paramonov: That's all Alexei Tolstoy: in a mild form, with captivating humor, he expresses, one might say, his symbol of faith: he is not a liberal protestant and anarchist, but a statesman: he is impressed by a strong power and a clear order.

Ivan Tolstoy puts forward this thesis at the very beginning of his book and sequentially conducts it in the integral characteristics of the Soviet classic. And this gives an unambiguous answer to the question: why the writer returned from emigration:

“ Ivan Tolstoy: “ So politically Alexei Tolstoy is not for white or red, he was for the builders of the state. And if he had to build red, then there was no choice. Aleksey Tolstoy was not a Bolshevik, but by the statesman ... In his actions there was an undoubted worldview logic: he did not poke into the eyes of the country to the new owners of their crimes - in which the collapse of the state would probably be in the first place. He substituted his shoulder. "

Boris Paramonov: Alexei Tolstoy is still good that one day he is read for a long time, if not forever remembered - all his characters are so alive and convincing, including the most passable like this Antoshka Arnoldova. For example, I remembered that it was still saying that he had a spirit, having received such a responsible task - to take an interview with the rank of General Staff - for before, before the war, he worked on the most meager roles - and remembers with disgust, as a week ago he wrote a review of the pop performance, where the actor, made up under the pig, sang bits: “I am not attracted and not hung I am a pig and thereby proud, / My maman was a pig, / I look like my mother very much. " The writer who is remembered in the slightest details is an undeniably good writer.

Benjamin Belkin. The cover to the novel "Walking by torment". Leningrad, author of the author, 1925

I will list other stories of the book of Ivan Tolstoy. This is a “king and a doll” - about the interpretation of the image of Peter the Great - a character, who was beloved by the writer; Point and the paradox is that the emperor in the interpretation of Ivan Tolstoy contacts his other famous hero - Pinocchio. Pinocchio performs in Ivan Tolstoy as a modification of Peter - mechanism, inaudence, “woodenness” of both are distinguished. Textually: "Pinocchio parodies the life of a young sovereign, he has the same round eyes, a stubborn character, a clubfoot gait, a desire to check everything in the world with his own experience."

Pinocchio, writes Ivan Tolstoy, - involuntary Peter. Or Peter - Buratino Second. This is how Peter was seen in the monument to Shemyakin’s work in the Peter and Paul Fortress: a doll with a stopped factory. Wonderful observation! In general, if two very different authors come to the same interpretation of a particular subject, then it is seen correctly.

Monument to Peter of the work of M. Shemyakin in the Peter and Paul Fortress

It is known that Peter the Great is the beloved historical hero of Alexei Tolstoy. But it is interesting to trace how he is linked with the current writer modernity. The writer turned to his image just in 1917 in the story "On the hole". Peter recalled during a shaken familiar order - because Peter himself was connected with the plot of a sharp historical breaking, his time is seen by a real revolution, and it is not surprising that a different, already modern revolution caused him memory. And the other parallel arises in Tolstoy: the parallel of Peter and Stalin. This comparison could not but impress Stalin, the scale was chosen by the most flattering.

Ivan Tolstoy summarizes this plot as follows:

Ivan Tolstoy: Many are convinced that the figure of the tsar-reformer under the pen of Alexei Tolstoy arose in response to a social order of time. Critics in emigration and Russia converged in one thing: Tolstovsky Peter was Stalin of the Russian past, or rather, Stalin Peter of the Day of today.

Boris Paramonov: Here you need to add another plot to the observations and analyzes of Ivan Tolstoy: to recall that the first volume of the novel about Peter appeared in the early thirties, when a very significant change in the Soviet ideological dogma occurred. The historical school of Pokrovsky was criticized and liquidated. M.N. Pokrovsky-also a pre-revolutionary marxist historian, a Bolshevik with pre-revolutionary experience. Marxism in application to Russia, to Russian history was taken from Pokrovsky in a simplified version of elementary economic determinism, and Pokrovsky did not take other factors of history. Russian history was a story without people, it was the impersonal forces of industrial and trade capital. The dynamics of Russian history in Pokrovsky is the dynamics of bread prices, if Russian bread, bread trade, bread exports were his main economic and almost the only content of Russian history. At the same time, he regarded capitalism in Russia as a very mature, and the socialist revolution in Russia presented to him by a certain historical fatum independent of people's activity. This could not please Stalin, for some time (if not always) preoccupied with his role in history, his claim to historical greatness. Having decided to get rid of Pokrovsky’s interpretations, Stalin told Bubnova to the then drug addict: your schools think that Napoleon is a cake.

Stalin told the then drug addiction to Bubnova: your schoolchildren think that Napoleon is a cake

It is clear that Alexei Tolstoy, who guessed such a mindset by the leader and having drawn into the eyes of the parallel of the Petrine Reform and the Bolshevik Revolution, fell into the apple itself - and secured his political alibi. And he in every possible way pressed this comparison, wrote, for example, that it was not without reason that a novel about Peter began to write at the beginning of the first five -year plan (having forgotten about this occasion about his former Petrine developments).

This plot was discovered and analyzed by another Russian historian, who became the head of the most significant Russian liberal party of constitutional democrats ("cadets" for brevity), and after the revolution ended up abroad, in exile, Pavel Nikolaevich Milyukov. I read his article about the end of the Pokrovsky school in the emigrant magazine Modern Notes.

I will indicate the other stories of Tolstoy-Vyuka's book. They are represented in three chapters - “Third Tolstoy and the Second Tchaikovsky”, “In Olivin Frost” - this is about the novel “Hyperboloid Engineer Garin” and “Documentary Nebits” - about the play of Tolstoy and Pavel Schegolev “The Empress’s Conspiracy”.

Pavel Eliseevich Schegolev is a prominent Pushkin historian and expert in the Decembrist theme. I remember his polemic with Yuri Tynyanov on the question of Pushkin's so -called shabby love. Schegolev spoke of Maria Raevskaya, and Tynyanov nominated for this role to Ekaterina Karamzin - his wife, then the widow of a great historian. I also recalled that the Tynyanovsky interpretation was warmly supported by film director Eisenstein, who wrote to him that he was ready to make a film on this topic. Eisenstein was a fan of psychoanalysis and saw the plot in this story of Edipov.

A. Tolstoy, P. Schegolev. The conspiracy of the empress. Leningrad, state. Publisher, 1926

At the beginning of the revolution, the richest archives of the police department fell into the hands of Schegolev, which, just in case, and not to be subjected to the risks of revolutionary fever, hid in his apartment, on Bolshaya Noble Street, says Ivan Tolstoy. This is on the Petrograd side, immediately behind the Trinity bridge; In Soviet times, she was renamed Kuibyshev Street; I don’t know if the previous name was returned to her.

The names of Schegovlev and Alexei Tolstoy are connected in a different occasion: it is assumed that they made a well -known fake - the so -called diary of Anna Vyrubova, the imperial maid of honor and personal friend of the empress. Ivan Tolstoy, touching this plot, writes that there is no decisive evidence, but on the other hand - and who else could write, except for the authors of the already sensational and the enormous success of the play on the same material "The Empress's Conspiracy"? It was nearby. And neither Alexei Tolstoy, nor his employee Schegolev, as you know, did not differ with special morality. And they did not feel morally obliged to people of the previous regime. On this occasion, it is not superfluous to give such a judgment of Ivan Tolstoy:

Ivan Tolstoy: The revolution, brutally crushing the whole former life with its mystical and highly conversations, confirmed, in the eyes of Alexei Tolstoy, the correctness of his intuition: he never believed in someone's spirituality, divorced from the soil, and carriers of tragic views, were so guilty of the death of Russia as the revolutionaries themselves, maniacs with ad. In the portfolios.

Boris Paramonov: But let's talk about the joint creation of Tolstoy and Schegolev - the play "The Empress's Conspiracy", staged in early 1925 in Moscow and Leningrad and soon gone for a lot of other theaters. This, of course, is the most interesting section of the book of Ivan Tolstoy. Well, perhaps two words about two more chapters. "In the Olivin Birch Brother", as already mentioned, is about the novel "Hyperboloid Engineer Garin." It was a hit of that time. Moreover, Alexei Tolstoy gave thirty percent of the converted text to each new edition: in this case, the book was considered new and paid completely, and not partially, as in reprints. Of the interesting details - about the possible prototype of the heroine of the novel by Zoe Monros. Ivan Tolstoy nominates for this role a certain Lady Abdi, in the girl’s girlfriend, the daughter of the actor of the St. Petersburg Alexandrinsky Theater. Naturally, I found her photos on the network: a large blonde, the type of Tatyana Yakovleva, it seems, then fashionable. As for the essay "Third Tolstoy and the Second Tchaikovsky" - this is about the relationship between the writer and one old revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky, an open letter to which Tolstoy announced his decision to return to Russia. The details are such that they make you remember the famous gossip: as if Alexey Tolstoy returned to the USSR not so much to build a new world as running away from debts.

Alexey Tolstoy. Photo by M. Nappelbauma, 1923

So, about the play "The Empress's Conspiracy." Such the authors considered Alexandra Fedorovna to remove her husband from power and become regent with a young heir. I must say that this version is by no means confirmed by historical documents, and in the play itself there is no emphasis on this. It was not so much intention as unless a vague desire. So the plot about the conspiracy is just a bait: put this word in the name of the play for the great entertainment of the audience. The viewer really fell with a rampart. In connection with this, Ivan Tolstoy gives a precious detail: contemporaries told how the peasant family - a peasant and a woman, appeared at the cash desk of the Big Drama Theater, where the play was going on, asking: where is the living king showing here?

Not alone were impressive by the performance. Ivan Tolstoy gives Anastasia Romanovna Krandievskaya - Mother N.V. Krandievskaya, then wife of Alexei Tolstoy; Of particular interest to this recall is given by the fact that Anastasia Romanovna was almost deafering by that time:

Ivan Tolstoy: “To what skill all the characters were made, how the whole play was a success, if you force a deaf person from 8 to one in the morning to sit in intense attention and curiosity (...), that even a strange thing turned out-somehow (wonderful directly) were transmitted to me, deaf, like a stone, whole phrases, and all the course of plays in general I learned.”

Boris Paramonov: the center of the play and the play, however, was not the king and not the queen, but Grigory Rasputin performed by actor Monakhov. I remember a review of him and the diary of Korney Chukovsky: that the actor showed the spontaneous charm of this, very Russian, man. Around Rasputin, reviews about the play and the performance were concentrated. Almost all unanimously repeated that Rasputin was shown by a simply smart and cunning man-by no means a mysterious old man gifted with a certain mystical force.

Here is the review of the famous theatrical critic of Kugel, in general, almost unanimously repeated by almost all those who wrote about the performance:

Ivan Tolstoy: Monks "with a huge artistic instinct and tact exposes the legend of Rasputin-mystics, a religious-abstract subject. His Rasputin is a smart and cunning ambitious adventurer. He skillfully hides his true creature under different masks."

Rasputin is a smart and cunning ambitious adventurer. He skillfully hides his true creature of a predator under different larchs

Boris Paramonov: Moreover, the judgment of one very unusual viewer is even more interesting. This is Vasily Vitalievich Shulgin - a prominent pre -revolutionary politician of the monarchical warehouse, with an irony of historical fate, who took from the hands of Nicholas the second renunciation of the throne. In 1925, when the play was going on, Shulgin was in St. Petersburg (this is a separate story of his allegedly illegal penetration in the USSR, where the Chekists actually held him and further for the purposes of the purposes). Shulgin writes in the book about this allegedly illegal journey that he was hard to hold back so as not to scream during the performance: lies, this is not so, I knew these people!

“ Ivan Tolstoy: “ He plays well, a man of a drunken, dissolved. Big insolent, but smart and cunning. But he does not convey the mysterious power that was in this person at all, since he could take possession of the imperial couple. And without the image of this Khlistov witchcraft, even leaving aside the pain and indignation, which are caused by some scenes, is not clear at all.

Boris Paramonov: I think Shulgin was still right. After all, even in old black and white photographs, the unusual appearance of Rasputin is visible-his unusually expressive eyes. "There is a lot in the world, a friend of Horatio, that your sages never dreamed of." Двадцатые годы в советской России были временем, меньше всего благоприятным для такого рода мистических внушений. Между тем есть отзывы очень серьезных людей, говоривших о соблазнительнейшем искушении увидеть в сюжете Распутина вдохновляющий миф о ныне обретаемом мистическом единении царя и народа. О таком соблазне писал, например, отец Сергий Булгаков.

Иван Толстой. Химеры и трагедия. Пять эссе об Алексее Толстом. Петербург, Издательство РХГА, 2021

Воспроизведя основные сюжеты книги Ивана Толстого и убедившись в немалом интересе его рассказов и трактовок, нельзя кончить, не высказав несогласия с некоторыми из его выводов. Причем это даже не само авторское резюме его исследования, а вскользь и походя произнесенная как бы случайная или само собой разумеющаяся фраза:

Иван Толстой: "Как минимум с 1921 года эмигрант Алексей Толстой разрабатывался советской разведкой в качестве приманки для определенной части русской диаспоры. К работе над его "правильным" ориентированием были привлечены (в частности, но не только) Илья Эренбург и Александр (Владимир) Ветлугин. Толстой, конечно, и сам подумывал о возвращении на родину, но задача ГПУ была широкой – разложение русской эмиграции – и толстовская фигура (…) до поры до времени подходила для этой цели… Теперь же, когда его роль в Европе была сыграна, возвращавшаяся на родину крупная рыба должна была по закону гидродинамики увлечь за собою с потоками воды и рыбешку помельче".

Борис Парамонов: Иван Толстой даже персонифицирует эту мелкую рыбешку, называет некоторые имена: писатель Соколов-Микитов, журналист Василевский-не-Буква, еще некоторые. Дело, однако, не в размерах рыбешки, а в принципиальном суждении, данном так непринужденно. Например, ну никак нельзя поверить, что к 1922 году Илья Эренбург как-то использовался в чекистских играх. Не то еще было время. Иван Толстой приводит ныне известный рассказ Корнелия Зелинского, говорившего со слов Фадеева, что Сталин интересовался у него, почему Союз писателей, которым руководит Фадеев, ничего не знает о врагах, затаившихся в его рядах: например, о шпионах Павленко, Эренбурге и Алексее Толстом. Мы знаем, что ни один из них не пострадал в тогдашних чистках, наоборот, каждый по-своему сыграл немаловажную роль в дальнейших сталинских начинаниях. Павленко, к примеру, был сценаристом кинематографической сталинианы, про Эренбурга и его роль в войне и говорить не надо. Приходится думать, что Сталин в данном случае не говорил с Фадеевым серьезно, – он играл или, говоря по-одесски, игрался. Таков был юмор вождя.

Можно вспомнить похожую историю: как Николая Заболоцкого на следствии обвиняли в участии в заговоре, руководимом Николаем Тихоновым, и как Заболоцкий обнаружил, что Тихонов жив и преуспевает в роли одного из литературных вождей.

Не стоит сводить всю многообразную, сложную, подчас трагическую историю советской культуры, советскую историю вообще к таким маргинальным примечаниям.

По счастью, в книге Ивана Толстого подобных погрешностей немного (собственно, вот только эта одна). "Химеры и трагедия" – хорошее, поучительное чтение. О по-настоящему интересных людях никогда не устаешь читать. Алексей Толстой был как раз таким человеком.