June 23 at Madison Square Garden - New York, USA, Light Heavyweight Boxer Fight weight category(up to 79.4 kg) - Sergey Kovalev vs. Marcus Brown. Marcus Browne vs Sergey Kovalev.

The percentage of early wins Sergey Kovalev KOs 80%. Early Win Rate Marcus Brown KOs 76%.

Fight for the WBO World Title in the light heavyweight division.

Where and when will the fight between Kovalev and Mikhalkin take place?

Where to watch and what time will the live broadcast of the Kovalev vs. Mikhalkin fight begin?

The live broadcast of the fight can be viewed on our website. Below on this page is a window for viewing Live broadcasts. If the broadcast window is not available, we will provide a link to the free broadcast channel.

Preceding events

Sergey Kovalev

Sergey Kovalev - Russian boxer professional (34 years old), performing in the light heavy weight category (up to 79.4 kg). Champion of Russia among amateurs 2005. World champion among military personnel 2005.
WBA super light heavyweight champion, 2014-2016; IBF, 2014-2016; WBO, 2013-2016, 2017. Boxer of the Year by The Ring, WBO, Sports Illustrated, USA Today (2014). Ranked 2nd in the Pound for Pound rating according to the Ring magazine 2015 - 2017. International Master of Sports of Russia.

Amateur career

• Number of battles: 215
• Number of wins: 193
• Number of defeats: 22

Professional career

After two unfortunate defeats on November 19, 2016 and June 17, 2017 - Andre Ward (31-0), Kovalev and his coach, John David Jackson, ended their cooperation.

Kovalev announced that Abror Tursunpulatov became his new coach. Tursunpulatov is best known for working with the 2016 Olympic champion of Uzbekistan, Fazliddin Gaibnazarov.

Under the leadership of the new coach, Sergei has already had two successful fights against rather strong opponents. Both fights ended ahead of schedule - by technical knockout.

Sergey spent his penultimate fight on November 25, 2017 against the Ukrainian boxer Vyacheslav Shabransky (19-1). The fight took place in the USA at the famous Madison Square Garden arena. Already in the 1st round, Kovalev knocked down Shabransky twice, and in the 2nd round, after the knockdown and finishing off by Kovalev, the referee stopped the fight. In addition to the WBO title, Sergei also won the vacant IBA World Minor Organization title.

Sergey spent his last fight on March 3, 2018 against compatriot Igor Mikhalkin. The fight was the title fight with the WBO world champion belt. Kovalev started the fight quite confidently and delivered more accurate strikes. Starting from the 3rd round, Mikhalkin changed tactics and began to move more, forcing the champion to miss more often. Nevertheless, Sergei looked more convincing and won round after round. In the 7th round, the referee stopped the fight, fixing an early victory reigning champion according to the WBO.

Sergey Kovalev vs. Igor Mikhalkin - the best moments of the fight

Kovalev's significant rivals were such boxers as: Andre Ward (31-0) - defeat, Najib Mohammed (37-3-0) - victory, Jean Pascal (29-2-1) - victory, Bernard Hopkins (55-6-2 ) - victory - won the title of WBA super light heavyweight champion, Cedric Agnew (26-0) - victory, Nathan Cleverly (26-0) - victory, Igor Mikhalkin (21-1) - victory, Ismail Sillah (21 -1) - victory.

Marcus Brown

Marcus Brown - promising american boxer a professional competing in the light heavy weight category (up to 79.4 kg). Member of the US Olympic boxing team as an amateur. 2016 WBC (USNBC) U.S. Light Heavyweight Champion.

Amateur career

In 2012, as part of the US national boxing team, participating in the summer Olympic Games in London, but in the 1st round of the competition lost with a close score to Australian Damien Hooper.

Professional career

In total, in the pro ring, the American spent 74 rounds with his 21 victories. Only 5 fights have passed all the allotted time, of which there have not been a single 12-round fight. Brown finished 13 bouts earlier than in the first half of the fight.

It is impossible to say unequivocally that he avoided sonny rivals and, on the contrary, he was rather competently carried out in a professional career. He met a less serious opponent in his eighth fight in the pro ring. The fight took place on December 7, 2013 against Kevin Engel (20 8 0) - Brown won by TKO in the first round.

Well, starting from the 15th fight, he had less strong rivals. So on May 29, 2015, Marcus met with his compatriot Cornelius White (21-3). The fight turned out to be quite competitive, but the victory went to Brown UD (10) - Score: 99-91, 99-91, 98-92.

Brown played his penultimate fight on July 15, 2017 against American Sean Monaghan (28-0). The fight did not last all the allotted 10 rounds and Brown won by TKO in the second round - TKO 2.

The last fight Marcus played on January 20, 2018 against the Canadian Francie Ntetu (17-1). This fight, like the previous one, did not last all the allotted rounds and ended in the 2nd minute of the first round with a technical knockout - TKO 1. Thus, Brown firmly declared his adaptation to the pro ring and his readiness to confront top boxers.

Sergey Brown is the grandson of Tina Vladimirovna Brown-Berz and the nephew of Israel Yulievich Brown.

Sergei prefaces his notes with a preface, which could be called "Praise to the site":

“First of all, I would like to express my admiration and support to Laura Itkina and other initiators and keepers of this site for their attempt to pay tribute to the Jewish education system in Latvia and, specifically, the Riga Jewish secular school, better known as Berz Shule. Time passes, and the traces of a brief and, unprecedented in history, flowering of Jewish cultural autonomy in Poland, Lithuania and Latvia between two monumental historical events are being erased: the collapse of the Russian Empire and the Second World War.

Few are left of those who can still bring to us tangible tastes and smells, the spirit and matter of those days. Teachers have already gone into the world of shadows, the last, miraculously survived between Stalin and Hitler, students of Berz Schule, crossed the threshold of the eightieth anniversary, therefore, most of the materials published on this site are in the nature of historical information, not reports. The images of teachers and students lack life, animation. I, who grew up among people for whom Berz Shule was the pinnacle of their life, would like, at least partially, to fill this gap, and let those who find my stories not respectful enough forgive me. The fact is that living people with their habits and manners are dear to me, not monuments. "

His notes are so good that we have transferred some of them to the pages dedicated to the people he writes about.: ,

My grandmother Tina (Tina Vladimirovna or, according to documents, Dina Vulfovna) Yakubovich, Brown by first marriage, and Berz by second, taught biology and French at Berz Shula. Her first husband, and my grandfather, Abram (Sergei) Brown, one of the Bund leaders, died in New York shortly before my birth, and therefore Abram-Itzik (Isaak Naumovich) Berz, the director of Berz Shule, was, de facto, and remained in my memory as my grandfather. He played a huge role in my life and, together with my grandmother, and perhaps more than her, shaped my character, tastes and affections. With him I will begin my series of sketches.

Itzik Berz

With all the high intellectuality of Itsik Berz, the basis of his character was his inexhaustible Jewish people. Despite the years of study at the St. Petersburg Polytechnic, which he graduated with honors from the Faculty of Engineering and Mathematics, the street elements of the provincial Rezhitsa bubbled in his speech. He knew and loved to portray in the faces of yeshivebokhers and shopkeepers, contractors and Izhevsk people - men who were engaged in timber rafting. Izhevts became my nickname when I did not behave like the young Lord Fauntleroy, my grandmother's ideal. My grandfather had a special Jewish love for a cheerful, unfeigned, mocking and well-aimed word, so characteristic of the Riga Jewish elite, among whom I grew up in Siberian exile. All the languages ​​he could speak were slightly tinged with a melodious Jewish intonation.

His father, Nohem, was a timber merchant, and his mother came from the Vovsi family, which was immeasurably rich in talents. Mikhoels was his maternal cousin, and therefore I assume that from her he inherited his artistic, bohemian, non-authoritative nature. When, in May 1941, our families were arrested and taken to the Tornakalns station, the KGB informed that we were being evicted to Siberia and asked the men to get together for briefing on the order and life at the stage. Most of the men, including my father Senya (Sender) Brown and his uncle, Berz Schule's teacher, Izu Brown, went to receive instructions and never returned; they were sent in stages to the Solikamsk camps. Grandfather, in his common Yiddish, explained where he had seen this instruction, and did not go. He had a healthy Jewish disrespect for authority. Most likely, it saved his life. He was arrested only at the end of 1941 and placed in a relatively prosperous camp in Reshety near Big Uri, where we lived, and where his daughter Shelley could take him food parcels until we were sent further into the northern Siberian wilderness. My father died in Solikamsk when, together with other starving convicts, he ate fat cut from tanned cow skin. Izya Brown survived because of his age and health condition, he was not suitable for hard work, as well as due to his light physique, ability to take care of his health and limit himself to a minimum of food.

Itsik Berz's bohemianism manifested itself, among other things, in his absolute unsuitability for commerce. When, during the construction boom in Riga, he invested all his savings in construction, he was one of the few who contrived to go completely bankrupt. He felt impractical, and was always drawn to strong women. They brought order to his life, leaving him with his exorbitant kindness and flights of imagination. His first wife, Berta Lipmanovna Weinberg-Berz, a clever, ridiculous and director of a school parallel to Berz Schule, was an outstanding woman. She took advantage of her knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis, acquired in Berlin at the Psychoanalytic Institute, and became one of the first psychoanalysts in Riga, and later made a highly successful career as a psychoanalyst in New York. I will write about his second wife, my grandmother, in a separate chapter.

Itzik was a born storyteller. He loved to tell stories. I will forever remember his story about the Lisbon earthquake of 1775. He described how on a cold Saturday morning on November 1st, the people of Lisbon woke up in a pre-stormy darkness. The clouds were gathering and suddenly, with the first thunderclap, the world shook. Houses began to collapse, fires broke out, and many residents of the Lower City fled to escape the fire to the sea and the Tagus River on boats and ships. The entire area of ​​the port was filled with people, and when, half an hour after the earthquake, a ten-meter wave suddenly capsized onto the shore, taking away thousands of people, houses and ships, Lisbon turned into a living hell. The black sky blazed with lightning, the royal palace blazed over the port like a devil's lighthouse. The whole city was on fire, and when the thunder died down, the screams of the wounded and dying people were heard ... Many years later, my family and I arrived in Lisbon. In the evening we went down to the Lower Town, and I began to tell my grandfather's story. Suddenly the sky was filled with clouds, lightning flashed and a deafening rumble of thunder was heard. My teenage children and wife, terrified to death by the story and the coincidence, demanded to return immediately to the light and quiet of the hotel.

Itzik told endless stories of his adventures as an underground revolutionary. The culmination of his stories was the story of his participation in the trial and execution of priest Gapon. Many years later, Berta Lipmanovna sent me to Jerusalem in Jerusalem the clippings she had collected from Jewish newspapers dedicated to the death of my grandfather Sergei Braun. I discovered with amazement that most of my grandfather's adventures, not counting, of course, priest Gapon, really happened, but with Sergei Brown, and not with Itsik Berz. I brought these clippings to my aunt Shelley, daughter of Itsik, and she was very upset. It was as if her father were lying. I tried to explain to her that a good teacher is always an actor and chooses the most dramatic form of the story. And what could be more dramatic than an eyewitness story ?! One of the favorite grandfather's dramas was the story of the fall of Robespierre. I am sure that if it were not for my, instilled in him, love for history, he would have told him as a participant in the event.

He instilled in me not only a love of history, but also of mathematics; constantly invented games with numbers, geometric shapes, told stories about the great Fermat's theorem, about the young, who died in a duel, Evariste Galois. But this is not all that he taught me. Thanks to him, I know all the indecent words in Yiddish. He was snooty and had a weakness for indecent. I still hear the angry cries of my grandmother in my ears, hurrying to stop his plebeian vulgarities: “Itzik! Itzik! " He drew a lady with a crinoline on a piece of paper, made a triangular cut and inserted a folded index finger into it, so that a very realistic ass was obtained. I am sure that the absence of complexes associated with sex, I should also be grateful to him. He had even more childish jokes. He told my little brother a story about a certain Khan and her son Yosuke, and then asked him: "What was the name of Khan's son?" The innocent child replied, "Yosuke." "Kush the world in longing!" - the adult reacted with delight. He had a favorite series of place names: Gindu Kush, Kushmir and Kushmirintokhes.

His only "weakness" as a teacher was his inability to give students low marks. He physically could not upset the student with a bad grade. He prompted them on exams, on tests. My grandmother, Tina Burz, believed in diligence. She set out to instill in me the knowledge of the French language. Relentless in achieving this goal, she spoke to me only in French. Twice a week I had to recite 5 pages of classical French prose to her by heart, and retell another 20 pages close to the text. Since French books were available in Siberia only by chance, I remember memorizing Seline's erotic prose, which was then little available to me. My grandfather was invariably present at these lessons, and when I stammered, he immediately prompted, calling out yet another “Itzik! Itzik! "

He had the memory and analytical acumen of the yeshiveboher, spiced with Jewish common sense. I was brought up in the spirit of Russian Menshevism and in the traditions of the Bund. I often discussed the subtleties of Marxism with my grandfather. I don’t think he was particularly interested in this pedagogy, but he could quote from memory expelled or shot in the Lubyanka's cellars “classics”: Martov, Chkheidze, Abramovich, Dan took on flesh in his stories. And through all this, it seems to me now, shone through the primordial distrust of a simple Jewish Litvak to vague metaphysical constructions.

In relations with people, he was as simple as a child and as wise as a serpent. A good teacher, he knew how to manipulate people. After the camp in 1950, he and his grandmother were sent to the village of Pirovskaya, a small Cossack village in a remote taiga, surrounded by a wall from bears, where people spoke as in the time of Peter the Great. I arrived there in 1951 for the summer, taking advantage of the opportunity - two exiled students of the Kansk Pedagogical School were returning for a vacation to the neighboring village of Kazachinskoe. Upon arrival at Pirovskaya, I, a 10-year-old boy, was immediately arrested by the local commandant on suspicion of transporting possible spy information from the deaf Kansk to the even more deaf Pirovskaya. The commandant threatened to send me in a march to Krasnoyarsk for investigation. It was certain death. My grandfather was able to extract me from the clutches of the MGB with the help of two liters of pervach, and most importantly, the fact that when he first met the commandant, he answered his question about his resemblance to Kaganovich, not for a minute thinking that he and Kaganovich were not only close relatives, but and in my youth we used to wear boots together. This put the fear of God into the soul of the commandant. In Russia, life is a wheel - today you are below, and tomorrow you are above.

Tina Burz

My grandmother Tinkhen, as her friends and relatives called her, was in many ways the complete opposite of her husband: pedantic where he was spontaneous, rational where he was talented, a secular woman where he was common, beauty where he was charming. Beauty was very important to her; she never appeared in public, and even in front of me, in a negligee without makeup, but always with tidy, slightly touched by blue, dazzling white hair. This is how I knew her, and once in Paris her hair was brown, Titian's favorite color. She and her sister Mara were known there as les belles soeurs Jacoubovitch.

Mara (Maria Vladimirovna Yakubovich, known under the stage name Mara Gri) was a film actress and singer, starred with Sergei Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov. The entire well-to-do, well-assimilated Yakubovich family represented that special elite of Jewish intellectuals that no longer exist today, whose homeland was all of Europe, the totality of European thought and art. The family read voraciously, knew in detail and loved German, French, Russian and English literature and poetry, went to concerts, but especially passionately loved the theater. The sisters were close to their cousins ​​the Azarchs. The eldest, Abram Azarkh (Alexei Mikhailovich Granovsky), a Yiddish theater director, a student of Max Reingardt, became the founder of the Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSET). Medium, Leonidas, was fond of cinema and became a famous French film editor; Jr., Boris is an American film director and screenwriter.

Mara's second husband, Leonard Mikhailovich Rosenthal, was a major shareholder in SocieteGeneraledeFilms, owner of cinemas in Paris, and financed films and theater productions. Tienchen could spend hours talking about actors and directors who have become classics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Reinhardt, Tairov, Vakhtangov, whom she knew personally, about the cabaret in Berlin and the experimental theater studios of revolutionary Petrograd. Unfortunately, accustomed to repressions and references to conspiracy, I did not write anything of this down.

I do not know which language was my grandmother's first language. With family and friends, she preferred to speak German, the language of the educated people of Courland and Livonia. German culture showed through in its thoroughness and pedantry, in its love for purity and culture of the body. She persistently strove to banish dirt from under my nails and stains from my clothes; followed my posture and bearing. Most of these goals have never been fully achieved, especially attempts to cut off conversation while eating. Where can a Jew talk if not at the table!

The non-metchina Tienchen was somewhat softened by French humor and addiction to not always ideally sterile pleasures of the flesh, as well as by Russian spontaneity and anarchism. She also spoke these languages ​​without an accent, skillfully using associations and alliterations. She had no acting talent, but undoubtedly she had literary talent, especially evident in her correspondence, to which she devoted at least two hours a day. Like many Bundists from among the intelligentsia, she was the least proficient in Yiddish. It was a learned language. Disciples of Berz Schule, with the indigenous possession of mother-loshn, such as Sonya Tankel, laughed at the Germanisms slipping into her speech. She came to Yiddish, as well as to teaching, not out of a natural inclination, but out of the consciousness of a mission. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she believed that human nature is entirely shaped by the commanding influences of society and upbringing. Its popularization consisted of bringing enlightenment and culture, preferably a disciplined German model, to the Jewish masses.

She believed in the distance between student and teacher. This distance was created by a set of perfections, so to speak. The teacher's dress and manners had to be impeccable, his language correct, organized and measured. There should have always been a certain chill in his behavior, preventing rapprochement, a kind of invisible glass. Perfection is an attribute of the gods, and I think that she, with her beauty and aristocracy, seemed somewhat godlike to the students. Today, in an era of destruction of social roles, when men are not men, women are not women, and teachers are not teachers, I, an old teacher, look at her authoritarian tradition with much more sympathy than I once did as a child.

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We are talking here about literature and, therefore, about the meaning of life, because real literature is somehow correlated with it, it even helps to give life some meaning; but - not only about literature, but about many things in general. Among other things, these letters are full of historical and linguistic speculations, which have to be recognized as speculation, because neither I nor my interlocutor are specialists. I will say about myself that, if my life had developed more naturally, I should probably have become a historian, to which I was irresistibly attracted from childhood, but which time and place did not contribute in any way. I dare to think that I am not deprived of some linguistic instinct - it is no coincidence that the origin of words, their past and present, has occupied me for decades, distracting me from vital and practical matters.

As for my addressee, he, a well-known biochemist, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, that is, also not a linguist and not a historian, defines himself in a strange way. When, as a preschooler, in the company of adults, he read all of Eugene Onegin in memory, he was asked: "You must become a writer when you grow up?" “What I have become,” he concludes philosophically in his mature years.

And what a reader! Sergei Braun reads in seven languages: he does not “know these languages”, he cannot “read”, but he reads them for pleasure (for professional needs he reads several more) - and he read an incredible amount. The circle of his interests is immense, his knowledge is encyclopedic. This in itself makes him a wonderful person, but moreover, he still belongs to those lucky ones who creatively rethink what he read. Brown's thoughts, as far as I can see, are sharp and original, moreover in the most diverse fields, from painting to astronomy, and his observations, beginning from childhood in a Siberian village, are precious and unexpected. Needless to say, I value his friendship and his letters, which raise me above the ordinary? And what do I answer to them the way I would answer in confession?

Dear Seryozha,

I changed my attitude towards your memories; wiser (I hope so) between your third and your fourth chapter. I used to think: these amazing memories need only be brushed a little (by all means with my comb), and they will shine so that the lion Tolstoy and the tiger Dostoevsky will have to step aside. Now I have come to the conclusion that the editing is needed minimal, the same one that your professional friend can do: so that Marxism and Brownism go not with a capital letter, but with a lowercase letter; so that a woman does not marry, but gets married, and other similar little things. Your style is an integral part of your memories. It's rough, to say the least. To put it more, your Russian seems to be a translation from English. But let it remain so - for it expresses you better than a more sleek language like mine. The rest of my assessment is the same as before. Your life and your human physiognomy are amazing, extraordinary interesting. In terms of the richness of thought, the book comes out unparalleled for Russian literature; it is unparalleled: all comparable works are from a different genre, not memories.

Needless to say, every reader always compares himself to the hero of a work; on this almost in the first place the reader's interest in a large narrative essay rests. I compared myself with you (more precisely, with your hero) and I. As in reading previous chapters, I saw: it is difficult to imagine two people more unlike each other in character than you and me. I am a dreamer, a timid passive observer, in other words, a sentimental bastard; You (your hero) are an active creature, one of those that transform the world around you, and even in general. Of course, I envied you while reading: I envied your amazing surroundings (everything is entirely personal, intellectuals, take at least a Marxist cousin); I envied your mind (there is no need to say that you are smarter than me; there is no other way than this indefinable quality - mind - do not look). But envy is familiar to me only superficial (I have never felt Pushkin's "deep envy" for anyone), and after reading your chapter, it naturally gave way to admiration.

I also regretted that fate brought us together late. I have never had such interlocutors. You, in all my life, are the only representative of the ugly sex with whom I have spoken and speak about the beautiful field. So-called men's conversations, not in the spirit of your A., ​​but even decent, cautious, I have never conducted with anyone, let alone boasted of "victories", for me it was already the pinnacle of vulgarity. As already mentioned, I am a sentimental bastard, and physiological attraction has never dominated my attitude towards a woman. Now I like to joke, saying that a woman is a man's friend; in my youth - I was looking for in a woman, first of all, a man, a kindred spirit, coincidence of tastes and interests. A girl with an incorrect Russian speech or indifferent to Russian poetry could be a written beauty, she could show a keen interest in me, but she always left me completely cold. And if only that! I hated makeup, neglected those who painted lips; I could not stand tobacco smoke, I was not friends with smoking boys, let alone girls ... well, and so on. The blades protruded from the right and left, top and bottom. Finding a girlfriend was incredibly difficult. As for a partner, in my school years I never looked for one ... and I never would have been able to get close, like you, with an adult woman, even if the most kindred soul: adults were all disgusting with their down-to-earthness, their with immediate practical interests, only peers of the same age aroused inspiration ... I do not continue the comparison. The whole truth is with you, the whole common sense, all healthy attitude to life - too. But it’s strange: somehow, even now I would not want to change fate, experience, life achievements, mind with you. At some moments my whole life, looking back, seems to me a continuous suite of mistakes; at other moments these mistakes themselves seem to me necessary and full of meaning, and the life lived is the only possible and even happy. I couldn't be different. Admiring you, I do not change anything with you, nothing.

Naturally, I was moved to find the Kolker epigraph in your possession. Thanks. Recently I have been living to such an extent with eremit that I am not quite sure of my own existence; I am convinced of it in such cases: when I find that someone remembers me. Here, by the way, there is one amendment: for you and my few friends (there are no half a dozen of them left) I am Yura, Yura Kolker, Y. Kolker; but my literary name is Yuri Kolker, with cursive Kolker, and not Yuri Kolker. It so happened that the Russian literary name, especially among poets, is a two-member of the first and last name. It is impossible to add a patronymic to this binomial. Akhmatova was furious when she was called Anna Andreevna Akhmatova in print or publicly. Zinaida Shakhovskaya - a Western person, a writer rather French than Russian - in the same way did not accept the three-term Zinaida Alekseevna Shakhovskaya. There are exceptions. Dezik Kaufman, burdened by his Jewishness, signed his books: D. Samoilov; this is his literary name, although one often reads: David Saymolov. Fool Prigov built his literary name from his initials and surnames, and everyone knew that this was deliberate. But there are few exceptions, and I am no exception. This is by the way.

Thanks for the amazing reading.

Shake your hand.

Thank you for your response, Seryozha. I begin to answer - and I feel something unkind in my gut: I think that a whole treatise will come out instead of an answer ... as has already happened more than once in our correspondence, and on both sides (I keep your treatises, of course) ... So brace yourself and read with a bottle of whiskey at hand. Or don't read; I will be upset, but not offended - after all, we are writing, ultimately, for ourselves. I guessed a long time ago: in order to understand something, I need to write.

You write:

I called you back in August 1914, and the invitation, like a bank check, is valid for a year and cannot be withdrawn otherwise than through a court ...

For a year ... So, up to and including July ... and a hundred years ago expired? I appreciate your Solzhenitsyn joke. Or is it such a nice slip of the tongue? What if I arrive in September 2015? Or in November? Seriously: please write down your plans for the remaining months so that I know when to have a drink with you and when you are away. You are a traveler.

... do not be apologetic - I am, they say, a poor, but proud person - from you, my dear, I bears merit. I immediately remember the consumptive student from The Idiot….

Here you are in the top ten: it's about me. I am poor, proud and consumptive. Calling me an idiot would not be an unnecessary negligence either. Only usually they say not "dostoyevitsa", but dostoyevschina.

Pay attention, I am writing the honor with a lowercase letter ...

This is an achievement. You are on the right path, comrades! However, in response to my words "... in Israel I was Kolker Yuri, not Yuri Kolker - as in Hungary ..." You are dissembling:

I have never heard anything like it. You really confused us with Hungary ...

Yes, yes, here you are disingenuous. Or insensitive to this humiliation. Or do not imagine yourself otherwise than at a university where European cultural orientation prevails. Any letter from the bank or even from the health insurance fund will be inscribed in Israel exactly like this: last name, first name, not first name. Even on a university payroll with a salary, the same scheme. I can show. I have a lot of documents from the time when I lived in Israel; I still receive bank letters from there. With this small feature, modern Israel turns its back not only on the European tradition, but also on the Middle Eastern tradition, on its own great common human past. And it came from Russia, from uncultured Russia, - arrived in Palestine together with the first settlers of the early XX century, people who were often heroic, but did not study. In the cultural circles of Russia, since the time of Peter the Great, the European norm has been adhered to: first name, then last name. In pre-Petrine times, in Muscovy, we see both schemes - but there, in that language and in that tradition, the suffix always indicated where the name is and where the surname is, for example, in the words: Kozlyatnikov Volk, it was impossible to confuse the name and surname, everything understood that the Wolf is a name; that is why the second scheme, last name and first name, although unpleasant for a European, worked. In Israel, as in Europe, the two schemes cannot coexist, because the surname is sometimes a proper name rooted in tradition. I take from the network, from Russian networks, at random two names (I think writers): Murakami Haruki and Martin George; where is the last name and where is the name? And it also happens the other way around: the surname becomes a proper name, and here's Nelson Mandela or Jerome Klapka Jerome for you. Have you heard about this Klapka? Hungarian leader and hero of 1848, and in generous England - if you please, a proper name. And then there is a proper name Jefferson, would you believe it. And there is also — and it’s completely impossible to believe, but the idiocy of the Russian Internet extends to this very limit — such an entry: "Rousseau Jean Jacques", literally, I did not invent, there is not even a hyphen connecting two personal names into one; understand as you know! What good, tomorrow they will write: "Rousseau Jacques Jean" ... In Europe (in the countries of European culture), the order is rigidly established; it is violated only in indices, where surnames are, by necessity, arranged in alphabetical order - and with the indispensable condition: after the surname, if it comes first, a comma is put. It is inconceivable to imagine on the envelope the phrases Brown Sergey or at least Brown, Sergey; there is simply no such thing. And in Israel - please! And without a comma. A trifle, of course, but for some it is unpleasant; much more unpleasant than living in close proximity to Arab terrorism (you get used to terrorism, it is much more difficult to get used to rudeness). In him, in this linguistic trifle, something Soviet is heard by default: one size fits all; a person is a cog in the state machine, etc. First, a family (clan and tribe), then a person.

As for Hungary, a European country too, it is therefore an exception (the only one in Europe) because the ancestors of the Hungarians came from China, where the generic name, due to the structure of the language and psyche, precedes the proper name. For a long time the Hungarians are no longer the Xiongnu, not even the Huns, they have absorbed the Ugrians and Turks, Slavs and Polovtsians, the gene pool and language have changed, and this Chinese rule has been retained. I am writing this for the sake of pedantry, rather for myself than for you, in full confidence that you know all this better than me.

I fully support you, especially since, according to legend, my family arrived in Eastern Europe from Genoa through the Crimea. Their name was either Bruno or Bruni. I could have property interests there. I will start collecting signatures in favor of the corresponding petition to the UN among us, hereditary Crimeans.

You can say so: Crimeans; but they usually say: Crimeans or Krymchaks. As for the Jewish surname Brown, I was convinced - and not from your words? - that there is some kind of abbreviation that goes back to Rabbi Nachman of Breslau. Is not it so? Write please. I am burning with curiosity ... Crimea, by the way, cost Genoa and all of Europe dearly. In 1347, as far as I remember, the worst plague epidemic in history came from there. Twenty-five million people died at once, the population of Europe decreased by a third, and only recovered by the beginning of the 16th century. Didn't your ancestors go to Crimea for the plague? It is very possible to dream in this direction. The most mobile people of the Middle Ages, if not of all times, the Jews did not only transfer knowledge.

Nobody called me and Brown for years - everything is Sergey and Sergey, even though I am Herr Doctor Professor, and who are you (s)?

And I am a rolling need, which, of course, can be read in another way: the chairman of the globe. Stars are visible from the bottom of the well. (Anticipating your objection: "But the sun is not visible," I will answer it in advance: "The sun is today's thing, and the stars are eternal.") Have you noticed that poets often died in poverty? Of course they did; Mandelstam, for example, whose entire property was reduced to his clothes (and that was not the case in the camp); Camões, dying in the hospital (remember the little thing of one Freiherr in Zhukovsky's arrangement? "Poetry is God in the holy dreams of the earth ..." Joseph Freiherr von Münch-Bellinghausen). Or, even if not in poverty, as in debt, like Pushkin. But what you, I dare to admit, do not know: poverty overshadows the poet not from stupidity, but from unwillingness to be second among his contemporaries. The poet agrees to see himself only in the company of his great predecessors - and physically finds it difficult to enter into a momentary competition with those here and today, he disdains this competition. That is why I am not Herr Doctor Professor. And I would have done it, by God.

[I wrote to Brown: “… I have conceived a whole book to translate from French: The Life of Henri Brülard. It is translated, but it is bad. I guarantee that ten people have read it all over the world, in all languages ​​... ”. Brown replies:]

I cannot enroll myself in the small group of readers of this "life", although I really love Stendhal. I'm not sure if you're right about the lack of readers. Judging by the history of French editions, the book is quite popular in France. There are also many modern editions in English and German. For the Anglo-Saxons, this, of course, means little - they publish for the whole world - but the Germans and French are reading nations ...

Your words are dear, Seryozha, you are both French and German readers, not only Russian. But the history of the publications is one thing, and the keen interest of the readers is another. I remain true to myself: many have looked into this book, but only a few have read it. There are books published only for libraries, for bookshelves, for students and for assistant professors from literature. Try to read Paradise Lost today, in any language, - you cannot (and already in the 19th no one could, Villiers de Lille-Adan says about Milton: revered, but unreadable), but this book will always be republished. I know, I heard it and I myself felt that the sound - rhythmically - is very good, the English verse is becoming less angular, but poetry is alive not only by sound, but by the combination of sound with meaning, but in terms of meaning it is, no matter how you turn it, an amazing collection of absurdities. Here is the Lord God sitting on the throne, but at the right hand is sitting His Only Begotten Son, also on the throne (and in fact, it would seem, both are spiritual beings; why should they sit?). The first says to the second: do you see someone fluttering there? It is Satan who flies to seduce Eve, and further on free will ... You believe Homer and his Olympic gods, but here laughter chokes. And I also know about rebellious motives; about the love of freedom in the absence of freedom, about the republicanism of the author who served Cromwell. It doesn't matter: I'm amazed that not just anyone, but Samuel Johnson, the Dr Johnson himself, says: “a poem which with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind ". Of the human mind - no more, no less! What an example of vulgar literary centrism! As if there was neither Newton nor Copernicus! (And what “with respect to performance, the second” is, I think, because Dante wrote in rhyme, and Milton - in blank verse; what else could the Doctor have in mind?)

I return to Stendhal. You love Stendhal (I wonder which of his forty volumes of sketches?), But you haven't read Vie de Henry Brulard. And you won't read it, I dare to think. This book will seem sentimental to you. A person delves into himself, wants to understand himself. Compositionally, she is an absolute hell, a mishmash of everything with everything; worse than a draft. The author does not fulfill his promises (like most of Stendhal's works, this is unfinished). The author is busy only with his beloved. Yes, listen to him, partly in my translation, partly in borrowed:

“Of course, for me it’s a pleasure: to try with every conceivable precision trace and express in words my experiences, but who has the courage to read these endless yakani? Here is the lack of such compositions! And I can't, I don't want to embellish these platitudes with the slightest eyewash ... will I dare to add: how is Rousseau? .. I will say once and for all: contempt for talkers, and I despise them with all my heart, does not push me to seduction, as if I am getting closer to great writers. I only take credit for reliable image of nature [ie: human nature] which I sometimes see with amazing clarity ... "

“Love has always been for me a matter of the greatest importance - or, rather, the only thing. I was never afraid of anything, except for one thing: to see that my beloved is looking at another with tenderness. I am almost not jealous of my opponent, I feel that he is worthy of me, everything in him admires me ... It seems to me that envy, this low bourgeois vice, is completely alien to my character ... "

Here - I interrupt Stendhal - he says almost the same thing as Rousseau in Confessions; it says something like this: “passion, love were the main content of my life, and although I had few women, I was not less happy because of it”; something like that (if you find an exact quote in French, please send it to me). Back to Stendhal:

“I do not intend to write history at all, I only write down my memories in order to understand what kind of person I was: stupid or smart, cowardly or brave, etc. I want to give an answer to the great [Delphic] dictum: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν ... "

Note: I am not alone! Stendhal also had to write to understand! I appreciate in him, in Stendhal and in Brühlar, and other coincidences that justify me; that's why I love this book. Note also that the Delphic dictum was established in the Russian language in a completely idiotic translation: "Know thyself"; can you translate more stupidly - after the biblical formula "to know a woman"? This is where ambiguity appears. But the main problem is different: three words are where you can get by with two, as in the original. I hope you will agree with me that the correct translation is "comprehend yourself."

I revel in all these self-rumors of Stendhal. And you, I suppose, were wondering about Sorel, how his head is cut off. Regarding this chopping off, by the way, Stendhal has a funny thing: there is no description, only the phrase: "everything was done quite decently." Remember?

[I wrote to Brown: "... your life and your human physiognomy are amazing ..."; he answers:]

I attribute your praise to a kind of softening, like aged schnapps and game soften. However, I accept with gratitude and, if I publish, I ask you to write an introduction ...

I will write with pleasure, EBJ. I am very glad that now, at least in principle, you do not reject the idea of ​​publishing your memoirs - which, if you are lucky, can turn out to be a success in monetary terms. In culture, as in football, there is a certain unpredictability. Nabokov's not the most successful thing (for me - and a disgusting thing) overnight turns him from a poor loser into a millionaire and a genius. You don’t need money, but it’s never superfluous. Just this: do not expect a continuous eulogy in this hypothetical preface. As you know, I am a bit of an enfant terrible. I am not lying when I admire you and your life, but this does not negate the claims to your work. It is the contrasts that captivate me, if you will. And one more thing: it seems to me wrong (or even completely boorish) to notify the reader. I strongly prefer the afterword to the preface. Let the reader, whatever he is, first read it himself, and then check his impression with mine. The author first; commentator - then, his place is official ... Besides, I really liked your comparison. You're right: I am both seasoned game and seasoned schnapps ... Here's schnapps and a drink if we meet. Going?

[I wrote to Brown: "... I used to think: these amazing memories need only be combed a little (by all means with my comb) ..."; he answers:]

I, Yurochka, would gladly give you my text for editing, even with the condition to accept all your amendments. The only thing that stops me is the fact that you are lazy ...

You are wrong, dear Seryozha. Quite the opposite: I'm not a lazy person, but a workaholic. I am ready to plunge into this work, and I will not at all demand the adoption of all my amendments. On the contrary, my amendments must be authorized by you. Your amendments should go on top of mine, with perhaps some discussion of them. But for this - for the beginning of such joint work - you, firstly, must complete your work, finish your memories, and then firmly decide that you publish them in one form or another ... - because although I am a workaholic, but not one of those who are willing to work in vain. As soon as these conditions are met, I come to you (because it is better to discuss for schnapps) and in your house, in your palace mansions, for grubs and schnapps, I begin to work. Here you, I hope, will take back your words that I am a lazy person.

[Brown wrote to me: "... Bashevis-Singer in his will forbade the translation of his works into other languages ​​from Yiddish ..." I answer these words of him:]

Let me shake your hand. It is “from Yiddish,” not “from Yiddish,” as Russian literati write to this day. “Yiddish” in Russian is a masculine noun and declines as such; as the word "hut" (by the way or inappropriate: I always thought that it comes from the Hebrew שלוש; here the meaning is clear: a hut is formed three plane). In the same spirit, there is another touching and universal rudeness: they write “from Bangladesh” (instead of “from Bangladesh”), “to Bangladesh” (instead of “in Bangladesh”), and the land under them does not open up.

I believe that Yiddish is a language that expresses emotions very easily, while English is completely unsuitable for this. Russian or Polish, on the other hand, are even superior to Yiddish in the means of creating an emotional context for written and, of course, spoken language ...

Your words are a balm for my soul. I don’t compare Russian with Yiddish, but I firmly know that English smoothes, evens out and depersonalizes everything, so that even obscenities sound almost decent in this language. From this, however, do not conclude that I value Russian mat. On the contrary, he seems to me disgusting, disgusting and nothing more; and, in your words, pandanus, not least because there are plenty of other, not dirty, expressive means in the Russian language (not today's Volapyuk of the Muscovites, but the language of the Karamzinists). I know, read and heard dozens of times that swearing is supposedly extraordinarily expressive, gives one more dimension to the “great and mighty”; but I remain with my own: mate is the language of those who do not have enough words. (That is why it does not suit the face of a writer or poet, but only a janitor or a house manager.) Mat expresses meanness and is meanness, it offends my aesthetic feeling ... Although, perhaps, you are not talking about that when you talk about “ oral speech "...

And the Russian language, to be sure, as it was specially created to express feelings, it is not without reason that a good 80% of all poetry in the world is written in Russian. But why is he so expressive? Not only because of the inflections and the free order of words in the sentence, although they are the first to come to mind. Not only from diminutive-affectionate suffixes, sometimes wonderful, but so disgustingly lisping at Nekrasov. And there are only six cases in Russian, not 12, like the Finns, not 48, as in one of the Caucasian dialects (in which, I forgot) ... If you answer in one word, then - from its archaism, isn't it? Take at least the construction “I have” instead of “I have”, which directly refers to the biblical יש לי. But this is not an answer, but a substitution of one question for another: why new language archaic? You can also recall words like "cunning", "profound", translated from ancient Greek (the word itself is in the same row), taken directly from Homer; but the same is found in English (albeit without inflections), not to mention German. Maybe the point is that there are few reduced sounds in Russian? (How reduced sounds impoverish the sound of English words! Dublin instead of Dublin - you had to think of it!) Or because of the abundance of long words, besides, there are no less short ones? Long words are an obvious linguistic redundancy, an unnecessary luxury (for the amusement of the Chinese), and it does not boil down to archaism. Feeling in a word, in general and always, is conveyed by the fusion of sound and meaning, by sound sense - and in a long word there is exactly the same sense, and there is more sound sense than in a short one. How do you like this logic? Long word, abounding in vowels, equipped with suffixes and ending, is not only more plastic and flexible, it is more sonorous, it is closer to the song - to the most direct manifestation of feeling in the word. We take Russian verse in general, all of what it was from Lomonosov to the appearance of street and pop verse at the beginning of the 20th century - the most energetic the incarnations of this Russian verse (in Pushkin, in Bryusov) seem melancholy next to English verse, and not with Kipling, but even with Milton; less energetic - downright mournful. "From the coachman to the first poet, // We all sing sadly ..."

I have not looked into the Polish language, although I should have (they say, Mickiewicz is one of the heights of world poetry); probably there is about the same as in Russian, although flexibility and full sound, with a cursory glance from the side, seems to be less; after all - "Kovalevska" is poorer than "Kovalevskaya". By the way, I have long been intrigued by this Scandinavian suffix SC: did it get into the Polish and Russian languages ​​in parallel from the northern language, or did it get into the Russian language from Polish? (It also seems to me that the Russian suffix ICh and the Ukrainian CHUK come from the UK.)

Thank you very much for this story of yours - how you searched for the Yiddish script Manuscripts Bashevis-Singer, translated the story into Russian and looked for a Russian version of this cute nickname Loshackle... and then we found a ready-made Russian translation from the original on the net. Very interesting; and instructive. As for your confession:

I appreciate your valor; after all the efforts to admit that the translation found on the net turned out to be better than yours is a valor. I don’t think, however, that your translation was so “slavish”, but I know one thing for sure (and it seems to me, I told you this, because I do not part with this maxim): a literal translation always distorts the original. For a good translation, you need to be imbued with the spirit of the original, and take another verbal material. The more talented the original, the easier it is (provided that the translator is not devoid of talent, of course). I recently had a falling out with one of my friends, supposedly a smart lady, who did not want to admit the obvious: that it is easier to translate genius authors than mediocre ones ... But you forgot to send me this online translation, you only promised!

[In response to my words: "I am a dreamer, a timid passive observer, in other words, a sentimental bastard" Brown writes:]

Certainly, some fundamental differences between us are obvious to me. I have always considered myself completely devoid of sentimentality, but recently received evidence to the contrary. ... I made a file of about a thousand musical numbers ... Once I thought about what unites the choice of these melodies from different countries and eras and came to a terrible conclusion - sentimentality. Several years have passed, but I still have not recovered from the discovery that I am a "sentimental bastard" ...

This is a very interesting topic for me. You shared - I will speculate in response, not without the thought of justifying myself, of course. What makes all of us think that being sentimental is bad? Didn't it come from England? Is it from the heroes of Dickens (who, of course, is himself sentimental)? Maybe from Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky? I found his cute saying on the net: "Dreaminess in the 19th century is just as funny, vulgar and cloying as sentimentality ...". That is, with sentimentality, the issue was already resolved then, all that was left was to condemn the dreaminess. But what then are we left with? Doesn't this cancel art in all its manifestations?

Dreaminess is precisely part of the definition of sentimentality; but a person dreams of the future and the past, never of the present, of the momentary — and, of course, this is your case. Through a set of "melodies from different countries and eras" you relive your past, "dream" about it (not in today's sense, but in Pushkin's). Even you! This does not prevent you from being a scientist and an eminently businesslike and rational person. In fact, this is already enough for me to rehabilitate sentimentality.

But shouldn't we dig deeper? Sentimentality, sensitivity and sensuality are etymologically the same, based on the ability to feel, the difference between these concepts is contractual and evaluative, associated with tradition, as in words the culture and civilization ... People agreed to consider sensitivity as a positive or at least non-humiliating property, and sensuality and sentimentality as (to varying degrees) negative properties. Nabokov is credited with saying: “Sentimentality should be distinguished from sensitivity. A sentimental person can be extremely violent in private life. A person with a fine feeling is never cruel, ”but I don’t believe this, I think that this is a bad translation from English, it’s too flat and clumsy to say. Nabokov would furnish everything thinner: I would define a common place, choose my own angle. Without this, the sentence looks silly.

In general, everyone is free to put a little bit of their own meaning into words, which is what the writers always do. I give my definition. For me, sentimentality is the ability to mediated experience, where the main and indispensable mediators (necessary, but not always sufficient) are space and time. We empathize with the hero in the text or on the screen, but this hero is not identical to us, separated from us (first of all and always) by time and space, and then, of course, by his physical absence here and now, by his fiction, if he is fictional. It's the same with the past. Today and here I empathize with myself yesterday and there: this is (probably) the main element of sentimentality, which can be called remembrance, loyalty to the past, tearfulness and something else. The past cannot be brought back. Adherence to the past is ridiculous insofar as the past can be neglected, which is why sentimentality is ridiculous for many. For others, the past is no less real than the present.

With my approach, sentimentality is not at all funny and is characteristic of all thinking people. Of course, in Über allen Gipfeln it is present directly, visually, but, for example, in Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper, it may seem that it does not exist at all - but of course it is also here, because Einstein's article is just an attempt to convey in words and formulas (that is, indirectly and not completely) the illumination he experienced without any words and formulas (a combination of thought and feeling), moreover, experienced yesterday, and this minute, at the moment of writing the text, experienced only in part.

Now let's ask: what is the lack of sentimentality that some are proud of. In my understanding, this is the predominant ability to experience not mediated: local and momentary. I am hungry, I am hungry, I am focused on hunger (and I don’t remember what I experienced elsewhere yesterday.) sex drive). So I ate (it would be better to say: ate), I am full and satisfied; I'm feeling full. I take into account the past just as much as it serves my present (my hunger, my satiety). I build the future in my imagination on the basis of the projection of my momentary experiences: hunger, satiety and other belly. I do this, and not otherwise, based on whether I will be full tomorrow. It is a focus on physiological benefit. There is nothing to be ashamed of: this is the first part of the biological task of any organism. But this is precisely why there is nothing to be proud of here either, because this equates a person with an animal and a plant, and the ability to experience mediated just distinguishes a person from the creatures organized below. Memory, the ability to memorize is the first manifestation of intelligence. (Genetic memory, perhaps, too, but this is already a conversation at the level of species, not at the level of individuals.) Almost you can always say: the more a person remembers, the smarter he is. The caveat is essential: we have all met people who are stupid, but remember an incredibly many. This reservation is important in another way: there is no creativity without memory, but creative giftedness is not directly related to memory (to the amount of memory and the ability to memorize; neither Mozart nor Pushkin were the most educated people of their time).

The conventional understanding of the mind (intellect) involves a mockery of sentimentality. Clever, bare common sense tells us, is the one who drew more practical conclusions from his today's hunger and made sure that tomorrow he would more reliably guarantee himself satiety. The one who benefits most (for himself or for his own people, no matter how you understand them) is smart. Here, as to interpret, you need intelligence, you need mental abilities, you need memory, of course. But another understanding of the mind is also possible. From century to century (it would be better to write: from vѣka to vѣk) we see people ready to sacrifice their satiety for something else ("higher", as they say). Here is Claude Monet sitting in front of the Rouen Cathedral; sits with his easel during the day, sits in the evening, but he knows perfectly well that the painting (both paintings) will not be taken to the Salon, that he will not be able to sell it (them), that he has no money either for paints or even for food. Isn't he a fool? Is he busy with nonsense? No, no one considers him a fool. And Diogenes of Sinop, the first rootless cosmopolitan who lived in a barrel, is also not called a fool by everyone. They say that when Alexander captured Athens, he came to Diogenes and asked: "Can I do something for you?" He replied: “Yes! Move aside - and do not set the sun for me. " Here is a quote from my beloved Boratynsky:

Hence my words in the previous letter to you: "... I do not change anything with you, in nothing ...". And to your objection "I wouldn't trade with you either, especially about women." I repeat: any written beauty in the days of my most ardent youth ceased to exist for me if she expounded incorrectly in Russian or was indifferent to poetry. This is my credo even now (although I “softened”, as you note). Women's beauty is inextricably linked with the mental organization, the mental organization - with artistic taste, primarily with the native word. Three years ago I stopped communicating with a London friend who refused to understand that “no mercy for the sounds of life” is not literary chatter, but “high passion”; that writing is austerity. In the poet, she saw not an eremit, but a hedonist. No matter how I tried to explain to her that asceticism is also a pleasure; that "we are all equally blissful", that the poet does not play with words, but spends his soul, she kept pushing examples of unbridledness from Yesenin's life into my nose and could not understand their compensatory nature. She turned out to be stupid, in other words; stupid and went. Well, I have ceased to be friends with her. But we had a common childhood, so important for any sentimental bastard like me: this lady and I attended a literary circle at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers; we found common acquaintances ... Note: this is my second literary quarrel with a woman in last years... “In old age - the return of both youth and heat,” as one gentleman at Blok assures. There's more about Mad Edgar's Linor, remember? The first quarrel, already mentioned by me in this letter, when an apparently intelligent woman with a scientific degree did not understand at point-blank that genius poems were easier to translate than mediocre ones, took place last year under the shadow of Vesuvius ... and now I cannot remember Pompeii without disgust ...

But all this, of course, can be expressed in a shorter way - I mean our main dissimilarity with you. Wherever you have a woman, there I have a lady ... or, better to say, a lady, because today's Muscovites pronounce this word like a lady ... and I have said that for half my life until I came to my senses. Now I pronounce it differently. Do not lag behind and you. Prononcez après moi: "The lovely lady Christabel" - and the sky will clear up.

Shake your hand.

Forgive me, Seryozha, for answering you in three weeks. Needless to say, this is not because of inattention to you or because your letter was not interesting to me; rather the opposite. Although - I do not want to hide it - when viewed from the side, this is exactly what you can conclude. All this time, your correspondent was engaged in outright bullshit: he painted the garden fence, weeded out the weeds around the roses, performed masonry works (as befits a free Jew-freemason): from day to day, peeling off his hands, he shifted the slabs of the garden path on the cement mortar (the so-called crazy pavement); yes, plus to this - I went through all kinds of medical tests, do not be remembered for the table. Why paint a fence if you are suspected of having cancer? But come on - this, it turns out, is an urgent matter, and besides, "pleasure is higher than sexual" (as one of my friends in the immemorial Soviet times spoke about the sauna). I hesitated to answer this is why: only today, June 18, getting up at three in the morning, I finally read the Bashevis-Singer story you sent Manuscript... Before that, I did not want to read. I didn't want (this happens, you know) to plunge into another world, far from mine, fostered. Now that I have read it, I see that this world is not so far from mine, on the contrary, it is unexpectedly close - but after all, I could not have known this in advance, and I value my peace. The story is wonderful. I read it in one gulp. I don’t know in what translation you sent it to me, but I, an old nag, stumbled in only one place; the war is "shifting" there, although it is supposed to "advance".

I really liked your exclamation: "You filthy, Yura, a conservative!" regardless of its context. Gold words! All my life I have been repeating this about myself: I am a conservative (and what is nasty, and there is no need to repeat, this is implied). He even called himself a retrograde. I have an essay called Why am I retrograde written in those blissful years when I still believed in literature ... in Russian literature. Literature has now been discarded, and my conservatism has taken on a different dimension. I feel like I’ve just healed on this earth; I am disgusted among my contemporaries, who 99% seem to me to be idiots. I'm not talking about a country that calls itself, without any right to that, Russia (in fact, it is Putland, and its inhabitants are great travelers, if not downright Lilliputians): I am finished with her; I'm talking about the civilized West. I will not sit at the same table with a tattooed man or a bugger, let alone an anti-globalist or a green man (who are, in fact, outright fascists). Political correctness began for health: as a struggle against racism, for the human dignity of blacks and Jews, and ends for repose; it degenerated into its opposite ... or, as already said, I healed in this world. What is a Conservative? Before, I gave this term an optimistic interpretation: a conservative understands that tradition is smarter than the smartest of us, therefore he, a conservative, develops, and does not reject it. Now I give a pessimistic definition: a conservative is one who has healed in this world. The world belongs to the young and the tattooed.

“The court loves cats, and I hate them; so I feel flawed ... "

That you are flawed, in this you are right. What is it for me to be alone? As for cats, here I do not understand you. I also don’t understand how you can live with a person, disagreeing with him on such an important point. When she still showed promise, my daughter was looked after by a decent Jewish youth, intelligent and serious, now very rich in computer affairs; he was lying right at her feet, begging to marry him, but she refused him, because he did not like pets. A cat or a dog is a powerful tranquilizer. For me, an animal in a house is one of the few ways to get rid of the anger of the day (gardening is another way that came with old age) ... But, of course, I understand you even less, dear Seryozha, in another: in connection with the Court, since she is mentioned; I don't understand how you can live with a woman who is much younger than you. I would still understand an affair with a young woman, although even this seems wrong to me; or, if you like, something alien to me; but to live and give birth to children with a representative of another generation - no, it's not at all for me. Here am I not conservative. Tradition, generally dear to me, does not suit me here. Francis Bacon, I remember, used to say: “in our youth, our spouse is our mistress, in old age we are a nurse,” but times have changed, and women's equality seems to me violated in the union of representatives of different generations. Your particular case may be completely different (any particular case is always different), but in general, in this kind of union, a man openly gives free rein to his lust for power (the instinct of the strongest in the representatives of the ugly sex). Goethe, at the age of eighty, was going to marry an eighteen-year-old — that is, in my opinion, he was completely out of his mind — and this was precisely a power-hungry impulse; a famous and wealthy writer stretched his power over a little unknown girl, just "fresh" (at eighteen, according to Tolstoy, "everyone is beautiful"; as he says one guardian of the house-building) ... and the girl could not feel anything for the old man, besides disgust, but she could (if she was prudent) dream of recouping his death as a still young, but already free widow, heiress of his fame and wealth ... Another Russian classic comes to my mind, by the way or inappropriate: Nekrasov with his With the last songs ... Remember? "Tears, nervous laughter, seizure ..." The old man dies in agony, and his young girlfriend does not want to be a nurse with him, wants to enjoy life, to have fun - and this is even greater torment for a dying person than physical suffering.

"There is a very simple etymology of my last name."

Thanks for your help. Very interesting! I remembered about Nachman, but it’s out of my head that there are two Bratslavs (I didn’t think to look in the Vinnytsia province) and that BRN is Beit Rabbi Nachman [Rabbi Nachman's house]... It is even more curious that not only the Browns, but also the Branovers and Branams are all from here, from this abbreviation and from the Bratslav Hasidim! It remains to ask: what about the Baranovs and Barinovs? Are these not Jewish surnames?

“All male Brown children, including my son, did not cut their hair until they were three years old. This khalak is an old Hasidic custom of dedicating a child to God. Delilah had to cut the hair of the Nazarene (God-ordained) Samson in order to deprive him of his power ... "

Thanks for the halak. You always accidentally scatter these Yiddish pearls, long worn out for you, but precious for me, allowing me to touch the life of my distant ancestors. But is this the case with Samson? After all, according to a long-standing guess (I do not know whose), he was a priest of the Sun God and in this sense we are Nazareth, even his name - Shimshon - looks like a title, an official definition: sunflower, right? And if so, then cutting off the hair of the priest of the sun means depriving the sun of its rays, thereby also power. Somehow it is hard to believe that these pagan considerations made their way, in time and space, to the Hasidic Vinnitsa Bratslav.

[I wrote to Brown: “Crimea, by the way, cost dearly to Genoa and all of Europe. In 1347, as far as I remember, the worst plague epidemic in history came from there. " He answers:]

As often happens in life - there would be no happiness, but misfortune helped. The Mongols, who besieged the Genoese fortresses in Crimea, suffered from the bubonic plague and catapulted corpses through the walls to infect the besieged. The Genoese brought the plague to Europe, where it raged for 300 years.

Yes, yes, I happened to think and write about it; and I studied the design of this catapult (trebuchet, trebuchet). Only, of course, the plague did not rage for three hundred years: for three hundred years it was renewed, but it really raged once, but it was really ferocious. And it was not the Mongols who besieged Kafa, but the Polovtsians. By the way, why didn't the steppe dwellers die from the plague? Perhaps this infection was preferred by civilized peoples? Or do we simply not know about the steppe people? The Polovtsi, however, were only half nomads. Here is what my favorite (albeit flawless) author Olzhas Suleimenov writes about them:

“The Kipchaks were a semi-sedentary people. They constituted a significant percentage of the population of the Central Asian cities of Sygnak, Turkestan, Merke, Taraz and, mainly, Otrar.

The Otrar library was considered the second after the famous Alexandria library. Outstanding figures of science and culture of the East emerged from among the Kipchaks - Iskhak al-Otrari, Ismail al-Zhauhari, Zhemal al-Turk-stani, al-Sygnaki, al-Kipchaki, and others.

The sun in this galaxy of stars was undoubtedly Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950), a Kipchak from the city of Otrar, the founder of Arab philosophy. The second Master of the world, as he was called during his lifetime. Very early on, he made it possible to get acquainted in the originals with the works of the great Aristotle, Plato and other ancient Greek philosophers. He made musicology a branch of mathematics. He left works in various fields of science. He wrote poetry, like many encyclopedic scholars of that time.

In 10th century Europe, there was not a single figure equal in importance for world culture to the "filthy Polovtsian" al-Farabi "(here Suleimenov, of course, pronounces Russian, not Western Europe).

[Sergey Brown continues his thought:]

This led to a shortage of labor in agriculture and the failure of the peasants to attach to the feudal lord. The lords were ready to give almost anything to the peasant just so that the land would not remain a sire. The peasants were not attached to the land in Western Europe. In Russia, which, thanks to its isolation, escaped the plague, serfdom lasted in one form or another almost until the end of the twentieth century.

Poland also escaped. I remember well the map of the spread of the plague of 1347 (so now I am too lazy to look): there is simply the only large spot free from infection that catches your eye: middle Poland. But in Poland serfdom never took the form of direct slavery, as in Muscovy, Russia, the Council of Deputies ... There is no dispute: the reason you indicated is very important, but it is not the only one. Western freedoms, including agrarian freedoms, largely grew out of the confrontation between church and state, which Russia did not know.

I've read all of Stendhal's novels. As a teenager, I reread Red and Black dozens of times. I still have a battered and crumbling French edition of the 1920s, which I brought back from Siberia. As a young man, with the light hand of André Gide, I was very fond of "Armance".

The inability to respond with love of the flesh to love was very frightening to me then.

Whom did she not frighten in her youth ?! Of the ugly sex, I mean. The fair sex does not have this difficulty ... or rather, it is not discussed. More precisely: it has not been discussed for centuries, millennia, never since the beginning of human history, and now we are already so matured that we are discussing this ... By the way, remember what Sorel says in his mind after a night with Matilda? - "And it's all?!". In my opinion, here is one of key points novel ... but the chain of associations takes me too far.

The Parma Abode left me cold. Perhaps I got to her too late. I have read, if not all, then most of [Stendhal's] Italian chronicles. From the rest I read About Love, History of Painting in Italy, Racine and Shakespeare, Memoirs of an egotist, Rome, Naples and Florence and Notes of a Tourist.

I also read all this, and also at a tender age (plus Parma monastery ), but unfortunately in bad Russian translations. In most of these translations, Stendhal is a poor stylist, sometimes to the point of absurdity. As a child, I did not understand what was the matter; why does the writer suddenly become somehow insignificant, non-witty, or even simply stupid. Of course, even then it should be said that translating Stendhal is not easy; to sympathize with him, to empathize is not for everyone; and, of course, this was not given to a translator who worked in Stalin's years for a fee (and in anticipation of being sent to the Gulag or being shot).

For a French reader, Stendhal's style is unusually restrained and elegant - an example of true beauty. I think that in France he was underestimated and continues to be underestimated.

These qualities did not come at the right time. And is restraint a French quality? No, I will also say this: Stendhal is restrained in his famous novels, to be sure, but in his main things like The lives of Henri Brulard or Notes of an egotist he is exactly unrestrained, writes quickly, the pen does not keep up with thoughts, there is no trace of elegance (in Russian) - and things remain unfinished. Good restraint if the writer has not completed 90% of his writing! And that he was underestimated, it could not be otherwise, because the predominant reader is an average peasant, seated under the dome of the Gaussian bell of the probability distribution. Popular means mediocre. Remember that all of Stendhal's fame is posthumous, that is, arising from the judgments of the intellectual elite, not from the popular response.

He undoubtedly influenced Merime, whom I love very much, but hardly anyone else. In Russian literature there is no one like him, there can only be Korolenko and, in a strange way, Chekhov the playwright, whose romanticism always hides behind an ironic perception of absurd reality.

There is nothing to say about Merim: this is understandable; their friendship is not accidental; there was also a direct apprenticeship, not without reason Mérimée is the smartest writer of his generation ... and as if not quite French. I don’t argue about Chekhov and Korolenka, although I cannot answer immediately yes; you need to take a closer look. But in Russia, Stendhal primarily influenced Tolstoy. What you call restraint and elegance was not entirely appreciated in France during the era when Hugo reigned. (This is really a "great writer"! - I am recalling from memory the ironic exclamation of Andrei the Gide ... yes, yes; I am convinced that it is not Andre, but Andrei, who is right - do you dare to object? Today Hugo is only ridiculous, but in every In the French city there is Victor Hugo Street, as in the Council of Deputies there is Lenin Street ... which is understandable: Hugo worked for the people.) But Tolstoy, if we talk about style, saw and took from Stendhal naturalness , stretching to some confusion in the organization of the text, to the negligence that followed in Stendhal's cursive writing. Tolstoy himself, unlike Stendhal, wrote slowly, rewrote it many times - and at the same time deliberately imitated Stendhal's cursive writing, arranged his phrases so that they were unsightly, so that in them there was unacceptable negligence! - repeated pronouns of the type which the(that's why arrogant readers usually say: "If I wrote prose, I would write like Tolstoy"). In Russia, as far as I can see, Kuprin alone, after Tolstoy, succeeded in such Stendhal's prose, but, of course, he did not study with Stendhal, perhaps even not with Tolstoy, but simply was so arranged: shallow, but wonderfully natural ... If we talk about philosophy life and literature, Tolstoy also took from Stendhal his attitude to war, an understanding of battle scenes. There is a direct connection between the young men Fabrizio at Waterloo and Kolya Rostov; is not it so?

I swear naturally and masterly, but I don't waste my swearing on trifles. At the moment of a mental storm or supreme bliss, I look around, and in the face of fate, I break out "yo-ma-yo" !!!

You, Seryozha, are solid Sturm und Drang. But in relation to the mate, you are in the crowd, with the crowd. What Russian does not say about himself: "I swear masterly"? Stop the first comer. Everyone is proud of it; everyone but me. I stay with my own. Not that I was not with the crowd in my youth, but when I got older, I said to myself, anticipating Arafat’s enough is enough is enough: I don’t want this anymore; I do not want baseness and cynicism; there are already plenty of them around. And I don’t want two speech layers in my life: one for some, another for others. I want to be consistent and whole. As for your ability to look around at the moment of supreme bliss, it is touching. Also add: "with cold attention", and there will be quite a Sharman Sharman.

[I wrote to Brown: “... I have long been intrigued by this Scandinavian suffix SC: did it get into the Polish and Russian languages ​​in parallel from the northern language, or did it get into the Russian language from Polish? (It also seems to me that the Russian suffix ICh and the Ukrainian CHUK come from the UK.) ”. Brown replies:]

“Yurochka, you are an incorrigible romantic. All Germanic languages ​​come from Scandinavia and more recently. Many phonetic and grammatical shifts took place in them, but few morphological ones. The suffix –sk exists in all Germanic languages. You just had to look at the word Cornish or English - English-Englisk. The same in German: Deutsch - Dautsk, Russisk. But the matter does not stop there. To speak in Latvian: runāt latviski, in Russian - krieviski - crookedly. The same is in all Slavic languages. Undoubtedly, this suffix existed in the Proto-Slavo-Balto-Germanic language back in Moravia, where the paths of the speakers of these languages ​​diverged. I was too lazy to dig in the net - you can do it yourself, but, in my opinion, this suffix is ​​also in the Romance languages. Tedesko, portugues, anglais - you can smell -sk everywhere. Most likely, it is general Proto-Indo-European. I can also answer your second question in the affirmative. You have already seen that in many Germanic languages ​​the old -sk turned into sibilant -ch, -sh, although the spelling retains the original suffix. The root -sk in Latvian always corresponds to -ш, -ч or -Щ in Russian: skaidrs - generous, skābe (acid) - sorrel, skaits - count. In fact, the meaning of -sk is not so much a possessive suffix as a private one - Russian [is] part of Russia, Kursk is a special case of the Kurians, and Stepanich is a special case of Styopa's descendants ... "

Thank you for this wonderful linguistic essay, Seryozha. Not that all this was news to me, but the clarifications and examples are wonderful and instructive. Some are breathtaking. How nice that Russian in Latvian is Krivich! Today's inhabitants of Putlandia are almost all Krivichi ... although my definition is greats- works. (By the way, the term Putlandia rumored to have already been picked up, but it belongs to me, so know it; I claim copyright on it.)

However, it seems to me that you left my question unanswered - it must be because I put it indistinctly. The cultural vector looks in everything from Poland to Muscovy; does it look here with this suffix? All culture in the European sense of the word came to Muscovy from Poland. In Poland, universities with Latin appeared centuries before the appearance of the first secular (non-monastic) school in Moscow. It is clear that the word Murmansk is directly Scandinavian (and by the root, not so much by the suffix). But the abundance of new cities with names in -sk in Russia in recent centuries (Bobruisk, Yeisk, Dnepropetrovsk) is not a consequence of the fact that the Commonwealth hung over Muscovy during the period of its military power? Was it not from there that the UK suffix was flooded in such abundance - along with hatred of Poland? After all, Poland personified the entire West for Moscow. The traditional hatred of Muscovites for the West, today mainly for the United States, is a projection of this hatred for Poland. But in Moscow there is a rule: whoever is feared and hated, is borrowed from him. Look how they are now monkeying from the States. Their language, not only in terms of the dictionary, but also in terms of intonation, is already modeling American English ...

And about the SC in Romance languages, I allow myself to doubt. Your Tedesko is just a distorted Deutsch. You can just as well dig deeper into pre-Indo-European Europe, and argue that Tuscany (a distortion from Etruscan) also carries the SC suffix. By the way, there were attempts to prove that the Etruscans are the ancestors of the Russians ...

If you want to state a dubious lemma without causing objections - rhyme!

By golly, you exaggerate the meaning of rhyme. Most people don't hear her. In Hertfordshire, I have a friend from Leningrad who recommended me a repairman named Bill (he is a decent Englishman, one of those who, having accidentally received a hammer on the top of the head, never swear). For this friend, English has long begun to replace Russian. When I tried to joke in front of her, saying: "Electrician killed Bill," she was seriously scared.

And meanwhile, you here expressed a very deep thought: the purpose of rhyme is to give credibility to verses, to turn words into formulas. The essence of poetry is oxymoron, acute stupidity; a poet is always a little enfant terrible (enfant - even a lot, for the most part). The rhyme makes the unexpected convincing. Note that nowhere, in all my life, I have not found such a definition of the essence of rhyme, it is - I can vouch with my head - the only correct one. People (like D. Samoilov) write scholarly books about rhyme, think deeply about it and its development (they believe that there is progress in it!), But it never occurs to them to reveal the reason for the appearance of rhyme. Rhyme did not always exist (and even now it is not required). She was not before Dante, before the troubadours. Have you noticed that good humorous poems certainly come with precise rhyme, not with assonant or truncated (which I can't stand in serious poetry)? It's the same here: the incredible (the joke is usually incredible) - you need to immediately confirm, give incredible credibility, so the rhyme must be accurate.

[To my words "Where you have a woman, there I have a lady ..." Brown replies:]

“I am afraid that after this letter, you will quarrel with me with your maximalism, although, God knows, I am your friend, I love and appreciate you. You are one of, if not the only person, with whom I am interested to disagree, and precisely because we are fundamentally different people, but, I will say pretentiously, intellectually engaged ... "

Yes, it is difficult to find a greater dissimilarity than you and me. But even though I am a maximalist (here you are right) and quarrel with everyone unnecessarily, I don’t want to quarrel with you at all, because you are a special interlocutor for me. Remember, I pestered you with a question about the etymology of the name of Napoleon? My guess was that this name is from Naples in its present reduced form. I knew that Buonaparte was an old Tuscan family, and I assumed that he came from Naples, and the name Napoleon (Napoleone) fixes this distant continuity in the representatives of the family. You did not believe me and found out (by the way, not at all right away) that the Greek name Napoleon, meaning the lion of the oak wood, was to my great joy, because this question was sitting on the back of my neck and did not give me peace. The find is yours, no doubt about it. But give me my due: quite often it happens that the problem is more important to set than to solve. In Russia, in Russian literature, as far as I know it, no one has ever asked the etymology of this name. People, it turns out, are not curious. Or was there no question for the polyglot Karamzinists?

Your Puritanism is akin to Verlaine, who has not yet met his Rimbaud. Rimbaud is the complete opposite of your concept of poetry, but it cannot be denied that he is powerful! With your unexpected passion for French literature, here's the amazing Rimbaud:

Awesome, you say? Let me disagree. The poems are written on the topic of the day, this is a polemical gesture, a publicistic attack in the course of the then (yesterday's) struggle of schools - this is already a bad sonnet. Timed to date is the first to become obsolete. This is a manifesto, not a lyrical experience.

Just around 1870, by the way, and not without the influence of new schools in painting and poetry, the idea of ​​female beauty begins to change (after all, women's appearance is discussed here); in the time of Stendhal, beauty meant fullness, plumpness, moreover, such that in our time it seems painful. A thin woman simply did not go for a woman. But this is by the way, albeit to the point. There was a rethinking of the world. Tired of plump women - and sugary verses (the Italian sonnet is always sugary). From the inside, Rimbaud explodes the traditional essence of the Italian sonnet: in a sugary form he describes the ugly (in Russia, Georgy Shengeli followed him in this). This, of course, is also an oxymoron. Note that the rhyme is still accurate throughout here — in clear contrast to the depiction requiring an approximation; this is also a mockery, also a twist inside out (however, an open war with precise rhyme began a little later). Rimbaud flaunts his baseness, hence the rhyme anus – Venus, unprecedented in all French poetry. I guarantee that this was not. (By the way, I do not believe that the original Clara Venus was written in capital letters; I think those two words were in italics or not at all.)

Another drawback of these poems: they are a reaction to painting, description, an image made by means unusual for lyric poetry. The poet depicts with sound, not listing and not reasoning. (I must say that painting, right up to the time of Rimbaud, up to the very impressionists, did not do its own thing, but retell literature.) But is the sound in these verses so expressive? I judge this with a proviso: I do not feel the French prosody as well as the Russian one; I could be wrong. But all the same it is European and not alien to me. I don’t need to explain why Baudelaire’s oxymoron is good, rangeuse grandeur, sublime ignominie - and I find nothing of the kind, nothing just as certain in Rimbaud’s sonnet. Maybe you will point me to "sounds sweet"? Just do not try to say that poetry is not limited to them. There is no poetry without them. Any meanness and filth can be a subject of art, but art can never become mean and filthy for a minute (at the time of Rimbaud this was not yet known and in this direction they "experimented"), because the purpose of art is to elevate the soul. Art does not at all varnish reality, but transforms it, changes it in such a way that a person has somewhere to live next, so that his horizons expand. The old, boring definition did not shed a feather and did not become outdated at all: art cannot be anything other than serving truth, goodness and beauty. Where is it here? Before us is treason to art. They want to humiliate us, shock us, surprise us - not delight(note the etymology of the word admiration: this is about ascension, about the soul snatched up from the ordinary into the sky). To surprise, puzzle, shock, shock - these are all the new goals of the new "experimental" art, and we have before us, as already mentioned, another manifesto in the form of a sonnet - art by its very nature is never new, it is for all time - or it is not art. The manifesto is quite outdated. What is new for Rimbaud and his contemporaries is outdated for us.

Years ago, I re-read almost all of Verlaine to see if he was benefiting as a poet from his catastrophic passion for Rimbaud. I never came to an unambiguous conclusion. What do you say?

First of all, I will say that in Russian translations both are equally bad, so much so that even their roll call is not visible without the scholarly parting words of literary scholars. Secondly, I will say that "catastrophic passion" for a contemporary does not flatter the poet and does not help, it is better to have direct egoism; in a creative sense, it is more fruitful. To a predecessor, to a distant literary ancestor, is another matter; here is a springboard; here the very imitation is in place, because under the new conditions it cannot become a repetition, but becomes an imitation of nature (with these words Aristotle defines artistic creation).

I don’t know how "ѣ" was pronounced in old Russian, nor how people of Muscovy pronounce the word "lady" today. As a person who speaks Latvian, I know that in Latvian yatu the diphthong “ie” - paspiet - to be in time or a long closed “ē” - sēdēt - to sit most often corresponds. The letter ѣ itself is derived from ь, which means it is an iotated diphthong, something like jä. Enlighten me, please!

You are an enlightened person. That's right, or rather you can't tell. On the contrary, you educate me. A little more, and I will speak Latvian.

I did not react to many of your thoughts, but already deep in the treatise ... It's time to stop. What can you do!? You are a challenging person.

I also do not respond to everything in your letter, and for the same reason. Most of all I wanted to be writing a treatise on the dangers of washing, in response to your words that Verlaine and Rimbaud never washed. How I understand these great poets! To wash - to harm health. With washing, power goes away. Why did the Mongols, a small people, conquer the world? Because they have never washed.

However, such a treatise has already been written - by my friend, Londoner Sasha Gorbovsky, now deceased. Gorbovsky was a great joker and created a miraculous monument to himself, which is still walking on the net. Thousands, if not millions, took his April Fools' joke seriously. This treatise: http://www.ogoniok.com/archive/2000/4638/11-42-43/, I hope it will amuse you. And here is another joke of Gorbovsky. In a London Russian (tabloid) newspaper, in the classifieds section (such as "I sell an old refrigerator in excellent condition" or "A Russian language teacher is looking for any job"), he posted the following: "Alexander Gorbovsky is kind and fair." And he didn't lie.

Towards the end, I want to return to Manuscripts Bashevis-Singer. Ask yourself: how did you like this little story? You didn’t transfer it for nothing, you didn’t work for money. Of course, the primer and the background are good: our Jewish life, tart in its sorrows and in its very tragedy. You probably also liked the language, you read it in the original, in Yiddish. And I, in addition to the background, remembered two bold strokes that make me think: a general portrait of the writer Menashe (“Only one thing was on his mind - women” plus “For years Menashe didn’t do a damn thing”) and the final question of the lyric hero, Strigunok (faceless, present in the story as a background): “Were you faithful to Menashe? Well, physically? " Jewish life is important, to be sure; when humanity matures (if that happens), all life will be Jewish; but here Bashevis-Singer raises questions common to all mankind. The writer Menashe is a woman-lover because the creative instinct is inseparable from heightened sexuality. (I put aside the question of whether the opposite is true: whether an increased physiological thirst necessarily indicates a creative instinct. I postpone another question: how best to dispose of this sexuality; Beethoven's question-answer, as far as I remember, said to a woman in love with him: will remain for the better? ”) Before us is the notorious question about the meaning of life. Bitter as it may seem, the meaning of life (even spiritual!) Consists only in extending as far as possible beyond the boundaries of your biological life, so that you are remembered as long as possible, no matter what: for your genes passed on to descendants (U Genghis Khan today eighteen million descendants), for your paintings in the Louvre and Prado, for your victories at Gaugamela or Austerlitz (better: Austerlitz). At worst, he set fire to the temple of Artemis, for Herostratus, of course, died, albeit in torment, but happy, showing the figurine to all mankind for all time. Hitler and Stalin will never be forgotten either - these are the true triumphant heroes. Your namesake Yesenin, you will not believe, as a teenager and young man passionately sought the meaning of life, harassed, threw himself into religion, but immediately forgot about these searches in 1915, when several tabloid Moscow newspapers began to print him at once. Glory!..

Returning to Menashe, who “didn’t do a damn thing for years,” only dealt with women. He disposed of his talent (his increased sexuality) in a non-Beethoven manner. I’m not saying that his choice was worse: I’m saying that this choice is a key question in human life, which people with creative talents often receive a tragic answer. This is what makes Bashevis-Singer's story so poignant. By the way, the manuscript thrown into the fire is a reference to Dostoevsky, Dostoevism at its new turn in the culture of the 20th century; money is no more valuable than money, and the manuscript perishes forever; it's not true that manuscripts don't burn. And one more thing: look, a writer, gifted and recognized, for years does nothing in terms of writing, only indulges in futility. Is this right? How can a scientist afford such a thing? But this is - yes, right, internally justified. No wonder there is a saying that laziness is the hygiene of talent. This is not about a performer musician and not about physics, but about the poet. And something else is said about this:

Note: "faint-hearted", "insignificant of all" - were you stunned by this? Here is the first, essential oxymoron of poetry. Do the Germans or the French have something similar? Of course, we will find this amazing idea in Scripture. The prophet, suddenly having his sight, prefaces his prophecy with the words: "I am not a prophet and not a son of a prophet." But did Pushkin draw here from Scripture? I do not know. Maybe, you know?

And the last thing that attracts attention in Bashevis-Singer's story, which is very important for him himself: the physiological fidelity or infidelity of a woman. Let's mentally swap Strigunka and “a woman at the end of her fifties”. Let the woman listen, and the Strigunok (completely absent from the story) tells; let it be the writer Menashe himself, resurrected and telling about himself - would a “woman in her late twenties” ask him at the end whether he was physically loyal to his wife? What's question! Who would it come to mind! This is not expected of a man. A man - traditionally, at all times, is a public being, in translation: public, while the construction "public woman" is still considered offensive, although a woman, equalized in rights with a man, thereby becomes free and - public... The question asked by Strigunk at the end of the story is Domostroyevsky. Needless to say, I am sick, always, from my youth, was ready to get into a fight for the equality of women. What a man can do is also possible for a woman - otherwise we are not people. But our ancestors were people, some - even great people, and always, for thousands of years, adhered to the principle of domestic construction. Maybe they weren't completely wrong? This kind of reasoning began to visit me at the end of my life. Maybe the physiological difference between the weaker sex and the stronger already presupposes a different social status and behavior? Again, I'm not saying yes or no; I say that this is a question that everyone has to answer somehow, and of course it cannot be avoided by a serious writer. In Russian now, without a shadow of a doubt, everyone speaks "courageous woman", but at the same time they mean not a woman with a halberd and pood fists, but a woman with strong character... Of course, syntactically, this is just ugliness and stupidity, one of the many stupidity of the Russian language, which has become incredibly stupid in our century. But the question here is serious, and not related to the Russian language: the less the behavioral and social distance between a man and a woman (the notorious potential difference, without which there is no current), the less we get from love - and the less chances for humanity to survive breeding and multiplying in the old, traditional way. Perhaps a "courageous woman" is the best answer to the demographic explosion, but they would not have been overwhelmed here, as happened with political correctness. Love has never been cheaper than it is today. Accordingly, lovers have never received less from each other than in our days: a myriad of times less than Abelard and Héloise with their only short rapprochement, for which they deliberately paid with eternal bliss. Do I understand it clearly? It seems to me that Bashevis-Singer brings us about this.

Two more words. Remember this reasoning in the story: “At times he was completely impotent. Day after day did not fall: first a giant, then a disabled person. " Now try to find arguments on this topic from Stendhal, well, at least from Armance and Octave. Remember in Pushkin: “Stern says that the liveliest of our pleasures will end in an almost painful shudder. Obnoxious observer! I would have known about myself; many would not have noticed… ”How the world has changed!

Shake your hand.

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Sergei Yesenin died during interrogation
The Chekists failed to hide all traces of the crime

So says Nikolai Nikolaevich Brown, poet, public figure, former political prisoner. Recently he held two author's evenings in memory of the poet “Yesenin in single combat with the century. Life and death. Only facts. " After a fascinating story, where some facts were made public for the first time, Nikolai Braun performed his songs on the verses of Yesenin. Having visited one of these evenings, our correspondent met with Nikolai Nikolaevich.
- Nikolai Nikolaevich, do you think that Yesenin died during interrogation?
- Yes, more precisely - as a result of torture during interrogation. It was to this conclusion that my father, the famous poet Nikolai Leopoldovich Brown, who personally knew Sergei Yesenin, came to. In December 1925, he and other writers carried his body out of the Angleterre Hotel.

"Father deliberately did not write memoirs"

- Nikolai Nikolaevich, when and under what circumstances did your father meet Sergei Yesenin?

He was familiar with Nikolai Gumilev, Nikolai Klyuev, Pavel Vasiliev, Ivan Pribludny, Alexei Ganin. Peter Oreshin. Klyuev introduced his father to Sergei Yesenin.
Brown's meetings with Yesenin could not be frequent - they lived in different cities, Sergei Alexandrovich mainly in Moscow, and in Petrograd-Leningrad he was on short visits. Their close acquaintance is evidenced by the fact that Sergei Alexandrovich gave his father the autographs of two of his poems: "They drink here again, fight and cry" and "I have only one fun left: fingers in my mouth - and a cheerful whistle!" They somehow miraculously survived the blockade, did not disappear during searches, and are now stored in my archive.
My father had a wonderful memory. But he deliberately did not write memoirs, did not even want to hear about it. Only in the middle 60s he first told me, already an adult, about how he carried the murdered Yesenin out of Angleterre. Once in the Mordovian political camps, on a date I turned to my father with a request to write about Yesenin. Tell everything as it was. In the hope that after his release I will publish his memoirs abroad. I had a long term - 10 years (Art. 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR), which I served until the end. My father listened to my request, partially fulfilling it. He wrote his memoirs, but obviously only what could be published in the Soviet press. By the way, as far as I know, no one else so clearly and accurately described Yesenin's reading of his poems.

There were no eyewitnesses to the suicide

- In connection with what on that fatal for Yesenin December day in 1925, Brown Sr. ended up in Angleterre?

Pavel Medvedev phoned the editorial office of Zvezda, where only Nikolai Brown and Boris Lavrenev were that morning. He asked them to come, saying that Yesenin had committed suicide. The writers were supposed to see Yesenin dead and confirm the version of suicide. About how Yesenin committed suicide, Medvedev, Frohman and Erlich told at the hotel. But they, as it turned out, did not see anything with their own eyes. They were also "told." The deceased was already prepared for the demonstration. However, the initial photographs we have today reveal something quite different. Yesenin's hands, it seems, were cut with a razor. But not across, but along. Like torture. The left eye is sunken. Two holes just above the bridge of the nose and one above the right eye. But Nikolai Leopoldovich told me about "a deeply penetrating wound under the right eyebrow," which was "fatal," about "a bruise under the left eye," about "traces of beatings." Father in a hungry time, in 1919–20 years to survive, he worked as an ambulance orderly. He knew anatomy quite well. He saw many corpses, among them there were also gallows. But Yesenin had neither a blue face, nor a protruding tongue.
“Yesenin had to be carried out,” my father said, “I took him, already numb, under my shoulders. Hair fell into my arms. The thrown back head fell off. The vertebrae were broken. " In the book by Melgunov, "The Red Terror in Russia", special strangleholds for breaking the spines, which were available in the Cheka, are mentioned. The stranglehold could be applied here as well. What and how was Yesenin's forehead pierced? This question arises when looking at one of the death masks, where there are two holes in the gap above the nose. The Cheka had hammers with sharp ends-beaks for this purpose. (I first saw the punching hammers in the political camps of Mordovia - they were used on watch to pierce the foreheads of deceased prisoners when they were taken out of the zone in order to prevent escape.) Could Yesenin's wounds be gunshot? I asked Nikolai Leopoldovich if Yesenin had been shot. The answer was short: "He was tortured!" A double indentation above the nose could be from a blow with his own revolver, moreover, the revolver has a steel eyelet in the middle of the handle at the bottom.
Poetess Ida Nappelbaum told me that her brother Lev helped a policeman standing on a ladder to remove the hanged Yesenin from the heating pipe. It is now widely known that the deceased's neck was wrapped with rope several times.
When a person is hung, all organs are relaxed. No doctor will believe that he is in front of a suicide, if bladder not emptied. Both on the floor and on the sofa, where Yesenin's body was laid, it was dry.
Brown and Lavrenev categorically refused to sign the protocol, which said that Yesenin had committed suicide. The protocol was drawn up even at first glance clumsily and primitively. But under it were already signed by the employees of the OGPU Wolf Ehrlich and Pavel Medvedev, the secretary of the Writers' Union Mikhail Frohman and the poet Vsevolod Rozhdestvensky. Nikolai Leopoldovich just rebuked the latter: “Seva, how could you subscribe to this! You didn't see how Yesenin put on a noose on himself! " He replied: "I was told - I need one more signature."
Held in 1990s years by the writer Viktor Kuznetsov, a private investigation showed that the signature of police officer Nikolai Gorbov was a clear falsification. As well as the conclusion of Gilyarevsky, which the supporters of the version of suicide refer to as the main proof. Gilyarevsky was a doctor of the pre-revolutionary school and knew well how documents were drawn up in such cases. But the local medical examiner was not invited. But they invited from Moscow the master of retouching photographer Moisei Nappelbaum. To file already retouched photographs of the late Yesenin to the case.

Detention with addiction

- Nikolai Nikolaevich, you think that Yesenin died during interrogation. Did the security officers "overdo it"?

Most likely. My father thought so too. The corpse was covered in dust, sand in its hair. Brown decided that Yesenin had been brought to the Angleterre suite. "Where?" I asked. "Probably from interrogation ..." It should be recalled here: during this period Yesenin was under investigation (13 criminal cases provoked by the then Lubyanka). Even to the request of the Lunacharsky People's Commissariat for Education to stop the persecution, Moscow judge Lipkin replied that this time the sentence would be executed! Thus, in my opinion, the sentence disguised as suicide was carried out in order to remove suspicion from the perpetrators.
The artist and poet Vasily Svarog, the author of the posthumous portrait-drawing of Sergei Yesenin, made from life, also wrote in his memoirs that the corpse was covered in dust: it seemed that he was brought to the room wrapped in a carpet. By the way, the memories of Svarog are another proof that Yesenin came to our city to live, and not to commit suicide. The poet had a great desire to see the first volume of his works, prepared for publication, and in the near future - to read his poems. And since Svarog was still a virtuoso guitarist and he and Yesenin had the experience of joint performances, they agreed in advance about an evening of melodeclamation, where Svarog would accompany the reading of poetry.
Angleterre» ... Whichever version you take, everything, from beginning to end, is fiction! In December 1925, Sergei Yesenin did not live in a hotel subordinate to the OGPU! Not on any of the lists. But imagine: a hotel would stay and live, for example, Mayakovsky, or Blok, or"King of poets" Igor Severyanin. It would be a sensation! And then Yesenin with all his suitcases - an incognito guest under an invisible hat! On the days of the party congress and even on the eve of the New Year. And no one has heard of him!

Border outpost in« Angleterre "

- Even in those powerless times, the poet's torture during interrogation should have had at least somegrounds.

The heads of the Chekists would have been removed if they had allowed Yesenin to go abroad, especially during the XIV Party Congress. His close friends have already been shot or died under torture, such as Alexei Ganin, who, according to a fictitious version of the Lubyanka, created the Order of Russian Fascists. In the case of the "Order" only in Moscow in March-April 1925, 6 people were executed, the rest were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.
Alexey Ganin was briefly married to Yesenin's sister Katya before her marriage to Vasily Nasedkin. He, of course, really wanted Yesenin to send abroad his theses, in which he called the Soviet power the power of "fanatic sadists." Ganin believed that his theses should warn other governments against communist revolutions... It is no coincidence that Sergei Yesenin, before leaving Moscow for Leningrad, at home with his ex-wife Anna Izryadnova, burned papers in the kitchen stove. Among them were probably those given to him by Ganin for distribution. abroad in particular in Italy.
There were also other, parallel cases in which Yesenin could be involved. During his arrest, all the papers were seized, the unfinished work "Parmen Kryamin", the beginning of the second part of "The Country of Scoundrels", where the action takes place in America, and about two dozen new poems. To partially cover up the search at the poet's place, Krasnaya Gazeta reported on December 29, 1925: “Yesenin read up to 15 new lyric poems among his friends, apparently were recorded only in his memory. "
Many are still surprised: “Yesenin wrote lyrics, drank wine and was fond of women. What does politics have to do with it? " In fact, Yesenin was at the epicenter of political events. I met with Kirov, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky. But lately he has been revising his views. And at the same time behaved imprudently. The poem "The Country of Scoundrels" is a real challenge to the Bolshevik government. Yesenin frankly expressed himself in letters to those of his friends who were ogepeushniki or maintained direct contacts with the OGPU. In one of his letters he wrote: “I cease to understand which revolution I belonged to. I only see ... that it is not for February and not for October. Apparently in us ... some November is hiding. " In August 1925 warned cousin Ilya in a letter home: “Not to the workers' school. There are communists and the Komsomol there. "
And in September, I had the imprudence to write from the clinic to P. Chagin: “To get rid of some scandals ... I'll wave abroad. There are dead lions more beautiful than our living medical dogs. "
Friends told Yesenin: you are next! When a capital measure loomed, Yesenin tried to hide from the OGPU in the south - in the Caucasus. In Mardakan near Baku, he had a conflict with Yakov Blumkin. Blumkin nearly shot Yesenin. Yesenin went to Tiflis and asked his friends to get him a revolver. He never parted with this weapon to the end. Apparently, Svarog is right: the poet's forehead, who resisted, was pierced with a revolver. The writer Pavel Luknitsky, with whom I was well acquainted, in response to my questions about Yesenin's death, directly told me about his impression of his appearance in Angleterre, here are his exact words: the poet, during interrogation, “was disfigured, there were traces of blood on his clothes, and the left eye" did not have " ... His memoirs, published in Paris in 1991, put it this way. I quote:« Yesenin looked a little like himself. During the autopsy, they fixed his face as best they could, but nevertheless ... in the upper corner of the right eye there is a nodule ... and the left eye is flat: it leaked out. There was no blue in the face: it was pale, and only red spots and darkened abrasions stood out» ... Luknitsky was a former employee of the OGPU, kept diaries.

- It turns out that Yesenin went to Leningrad to work, and the Chekists were afraid that he would flee to the West?

Yes. But even if he was going to cross the border with Finland or Latvia, he would not have been allowed to do so. The poet was besieged on all sides like a wolf.

The "rouged doll" was shown to the people

Esenin's appearance was "put in order" three times. Without "make-up", only OGPU officers and Moses Nappelbaum with his son Lev could see him. The first makeup on the face of Sergei Yesenin was applied in Angleterre shortly before the arrival of the writers. The second was in the morgue of the Obukhov hospital, before parting at the Writers' Union on Fontanka, 50. Many wounds and, moreover, scratches were no longer visible. Nikolai Leopoldovich Brown twice carried Yesenin's body: first from Angleterre - under the shoulders, then in a coffin - from the Writers' Union. He noticed great changes in the appearance of the victim. And in Moscow in the House of Press, as the writer Galina Serebryakova recalled, there was already a “rouged doll” lying around. Sculpture! Without any damage. Yesenin did not look like not only the killed, but also the suicide. That is why the son of the deceased, Alexander Yesenin-Volpin, was surprised: "How is it that thousands of people saw their father and did not notice anything!"
Emigrant writers 20's years, they supported the version of suicide only in order to be able to say: the Soviet government hounded the poet, who flirted with it.

Exhumation is impossible!

- Nikolai Nikolaevich, now about the possible exhumation ...

Exhumation, no matter how much talk about it, is impossible! Because Yesenin's coffin is not in the grave. This was discovered when Yesenin's mother Tatyana Fedorovna was buried. They opened the grave - there are three coffins, but there is no Yesenin one. Sister Shura remembered her brother's coffin. In an official letter dated January 4, 1994, Yesenin's niece Svetlana Petrovna Mitrofanova, daughter of Shura's sister, and her son to the commission of the All-Russian Committee to clarify the circumstances of Yesenin's death, it is said that the poet's mother's coffin was not over the grave of her son, but next to unknown remains ... the exact place his graves will now be very difficult to establish. " This letter was published by the commission. However, there was a person who stated thatYesenin was reburied in the far part of the Vagankovsky cemetery. Is it Vagankovsky? This is another question. That is why the descendants and relatives of the deceased object to the exhumation.

Mask mask strife

- How then to explain that he allowed and remove a death mask with obvious damage to the skull?

The breach was so deep that it could not be hidden.seemed possible. Found an explanation: burned or peeled off on the pipe. There are no traces of other damage on the mask. In Yesenin we have already seen the modern Pushkin. There is also a Pushkin mask. Well, they were allowed, in the hope that if it is possible to edit the poet's appearance, then the mask will not be difficult. Or maybe the ogepeushniki ordered to take off the mask for reporting, as proof of the work done. By the way, as you know, two people took off the mask. At least two masks are known. One- with smooth indentation. The second - with obvious damage to the skull. The so-called mask from a private collection. How she "eluded" the ogepeushniki remains a mystery.

Call the executioners executioners

The day after Yesenin's death on December 29, 1925, the Leningrad "Krasnaya Gazeta" published an article by Boris Lavrenev "In memory of Yesenin." It had a subtitle: Executed by the Degenerates. And the epigraph: "And you will not wash away the righteous blood with all your black blood of the poet." And it ended like this "And my moral duty orders me to tell once in my life the naked truth and call executioners and murderers, executioners and murderers, whose black blood will not wash away the blood stain on the shirt of the tortured poet."

From the category of miracles and adventures

- Nikolai Nikolaevich, I read that Yesenin died as a result of a ridiculous prank. Allegedly, as a shocking person, he decided to imitate his death ...

Many memoirs are a bluff, written by false witnesses, staff members of the OGPU. And then there were retellings without reference to the source.
In the year of Yesenin's centenary, the magazine "Miracles and Adventures" distinguished itself. It turns out that a certain Leontyev in the village of Urgal of the Khabarovsk Territory confessed to the journalist Titarenko in a bathhouse that he had shot Yesenin “with this very hand”. Allegedly on the instructions of Trotsky himself. The reasoning is simple: Trotsky and Yesenin had a common mistress. Well, Trotsky, out of jealousy, ordered ... This everyday version, in fact, is from the category of "miracles and adventures." In the early years of Soviet rule, jealousy was considered a bourgeois prejudice. The marriages were civil, few got married. And there is an even more absurd version - that Yesenin lived out his long life in Kolyma and wrote poems there for more than one volume. Take it and publish it!
Versions began to appear in society, like viruses in a computer, when there was an urgent need for an explanation of Yesenin's death other than suicide. Because no documents, no memoriesdid not stand up to criticism... Our family never had any versions!

Vladimir Zheltov