Shklovsky on a sentimental journey 1923. Book: Sentimental journey - Victor Shklovsky

Viktor Shklovsky - a sentimental journey

From 1917 to 1922, in addition to the above, he married a woman named Lucy (this book is dedicated to her), fought a duel over another woman, went hungry a lot, worked with Gorky in World Literature, lived in the House of Arts ( in the then main writers' barracks, located in the palace of the merchant Eliseev), taught literature, published books, and together with friends created a very influential scientific school. During his wanderings he carried books with him. Again he taught Russian writers to read Stern, who once (in the 18th century) was the first to write “A Sentimental Journey”. He explained how the novel “Don Quixote” works and how many other literary and non-literary things work. I successfully quarreled with many people. Lost my brown curls. The portrait of the artist Yuri Annensky shows an overcoat, a huge forehead, and an ironic smile. I remained optimistic.

Once I met a shoe shiner, an old acquaintance of the Aisor Lazar Zervandov, and wrote down his story about the exodus of the Aisors from Northern Persia to Mesopotamia. I placed it in my book as an excerpt from a heroic epic. In St. Petersburg at this time, people of Russian culture were tragically experiencing a catastrophic change; the era was expressively defined as the time of the death of Alexander Blok. This is also in the book, this also appears as a tragic epic. Genres were changing. But the fate of Russian culture, the fate of the Russian intelligentsia appeared with inevitable clarity. The theory seemed clear. Craft constituted culture, craft determined destiny.

On May 20, 1922 in Finland, Shklovsky wrote: “When you fall like a stone, you don’t need to think, when you think, you don’t need to fall. I mixed two crafts.”

That same year in Berlin, he ends the book with the names of those who are worthy of their craft, those to whom their craft does not leave the opportunity to kill and do mean things.

Zoo, or Letters not about love, or the Third Eloise (1923)

Having illegally emigrated from Soviet Russia in 1922, the author arrived in Berlin. Here he met many Russian writers who, like most Russian emigrants, lived in the area of ​​the Zoo metro station. Zoo is a zoological garden, and therefore, having decided to present the Russian literary and artistic emigration staying in Berlin among indifferent and self-occupied Germans, the author began to describe these Russians as representatives of some exotic fauna, completely unadapted to normal European life. And that is why they belong in the zoological garden. The author attributed this to himself with particular confidence. Like most Russians who went through two wars and two revolutions, he didn’t even know how to eat in a European way - he leaned too far towards the plate. The trousers were also not as they should be - without the necessary pressed crease. And Russians also have a heavier gait than the average European. Having started working on this book, the author soon discovered two important things for himself. First: it turns out that he is in love with a beautiful and intelligent woman named Alya. Second: he cannot live abroad, since this life will spoil him, acquiring the habits of an ordinary European. He must return to Russia, where his friends remain and where, as he feels, he himself, his books, his ideas are needed (his ideas are all connected with the theory of prose). Then this book was arranged as follows: letters from the author to Ale and letters from Ali to the author, written by him. Alya forbids writing about love. He writes about literature, about Russian writers in exile, about the impossibility of living in Berlin, about much more. It turns out interesting.

Russian writer Alexei Mikhailovich Remizov invented the Great Ape Order, similar to the Masonic lodge. He lived in Berlin approximately as the monkey king Asyka would live here.

The Russian writer Andrei Bely, with whom the author mistakenly exchanged mufflers more than once, had the same effect in his performances as a real shaman.

Russian artist Ivan Puni worked a lot in Berlin. In Russia, he was also very busy with work and did not immediately notice the revolution.

The Russian artist Marc Chagall does not belong to the cultural world, but simply, just as he painted better than anyone in Vitebsk, he paints better than anyone in Europe.

Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg constantly smokes a pipe, but whether he is a good writer is still not known.

Russian philologist Roman Yakobson is distinguished by the fact that he wears tight trousers, has red hair and may live in Europe.

Russian philologist Pyotr Bogatyrev, on the contrary, cannot live in Europe and, in order to somehow survive, must settle in a concentration camp for Russian Cossacks awaiting return to Russia.

Several newspapers are published for Russians in Berlin, but not one for the monkey in the zoo, but he also misses his homeland. Eventually the author could take it upon himself.

Having written twenty-two letters (eighteen to Ale and four from Ali), the author understands that his situation is hopeless in all respects, addresses the last, twenty-third letter to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the RSFSR and asks to be allowed to return. At the same time, he recalls that once upon a time, during the capture of Erzurum, everyone who surrendered was hacked to death. And this now seems wrong.

Victor Borisovich Shklovsky 1893-1984

Fun and practical knowledge. Mythology.

The area of ​​the Eurasian ancestral home, according to linguistics, was located between the Northern Carpathian region and the Baltic.
The main part of this area in the 9th millennium BC. e. occupied by only one archaeological culture - the Svidersky one, coexisting in the west with the related Arensburg archaeological culture.
The Svvder culture is the archaeological equivalent of the Boreal community. This conclusion can be made by combining data from Eurasian vocabulary and characteristics of archaeological culture. Eurasians at that distant time widely used bows and arrows, hunted with dogs, and tamed the wolf; created a new weapon - an ax. (Andreev, 1986, p. 48, No. 75; p. 248, No. 198; p. 18, No. 140). (Fig. 44: 7 a).
If these linguistic realities belong to the Carpathian Basin and the northern regions adjacent to it, they date back no earlier than the 9th millennium BC. e. (Safronov, 1989) or the end of the Paleolithic (Andreev, 1986), then the only culture whose bearers invented and widely used the ax, domesticated the wolf, and developed a breed of dogs were the bearers of the Swider culture. At-
17 Zak. 136 241
The presence of various flint arrowheads in the Svidersky assemblages is evidence of the hunting type of economy among the Svidersky people, with the leading hunting weapon being the bow and arrows. (Fig. 43.)
This preliminary conclusion can also be supported by a comparison of 203 roots of the Boreal language, from which the portrait of Eurasian culture - the culture of Eurasian society of the 9th millennium BC - is restored quite clearly. e.
In addition, it is necessary to determine whether the Swiders migrated to Anatolia and whether they have a genetic connection with Çatalhüyük, the Early Indo-European attribution of which was established based on 27 characteristics ten years ago (Safronov, 1989, pp. 40 - 45).
Since our task is to compare the verbal portrait of the Eurasian culture with the realities of the Svidersky archaeological culture, a material analogy will be given to each feature of the Eurasian ancestral homeland and ancestral culture.
Localization of the ancestral homeland of the Eurasians according to linguistic data on its ecology. Discoverer of the Eurasian (boreal) community, N.D. Andreev, identified signs (further presented: P. I...) indicating the landscape and climatic characteristics of the area of ​​the Eurasian ancestral home.
The climate in the area of ​​the ancestral home of the Eurasians was cold with long winters and severe snowstorms that promised death.
P. 1 "Winter", "snowy time" P.2 "cold", "cold" P.Z "ice"
P.4 “frost”, “thin ice”
P.Z "ice crust"
P.6 “slide on ice”, “snow”
P.7 “blizzard”, “cold”, “get dressed”
P.8 “blizzard”, “cold wind”, “howl blowing”
P.9 “wind”, “blow”, “north”
P. 10 “freeze”, “become numb”

(excerpts from the book)
Back in the fall, a studio for translators opened at World Literature on Nevsky.

Very quickly it turned into just a literary studio.

N. S. Gumilyov, M. Lozinsky, E. Zamyatin, Andrei Levinson, Korney Chukovsky, Vlad (imir) Kaz. (imirovich) Shileiko read here, and later me and B. M. Eikhenbaum were invited.

I settled in the House of Arts. (...)

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov walked below without bending at the waist. This man had a will, he hypnotized himself. There were young people around him. I don’t like his school, but I know that he knew how to raise people in his own way. He forbade his students to write about spring, saying that there is no such time of year. Can you imagine what a mountain of mucus is contained in mass poetry. Gumilyov organized poets. He made good poets out of bad ones. He had the pathos of mastery and the self-confidence of a master. He understood other people's poems well, even if they were far out of his orbit.

For me he is a stranger and it is difficult for me to write about him. I remember how he told me about the proletarian poets in whose studio he read.

“I respect them, they write poetry, eat potatoes and take salt at the table, ashamed as we are with sugar.”

Notes:

Shklovsky Viktor Borisovich (1893-1984) - writer, literary critic, critic.

The text is printed according to the edition: Shklovsky V. Sentimental Journey. Memoirs 1918-1923. L.: Athenaeus, 1924. S. 67, 137.

The memoirist's mistake. On Nevsky, in Gorky’s apartment, there was an editorial office of “World Literature” (later moved to Mokhovaya Street). The translators' studio was located on Liteiny in the Muruzi House (see memoirs of E. G. Polonskaya, p. 158 of this edition).

See commentary 4 to the memoirs of I. V. Odoevtseva (p. 271 of this edition).

Shklovsky is an interesting person. Unlike most, who hit at one point, he was completely unfocused and was doing completely different things, even the opposite. For example, he himself wrote and was himself engaged in literary criticism, that is, he analyzed the books of others, which is rarely combined in one individual.

As a writer, he was a genius of metaphors - precise, beautiful, and at the same time far-fetched from a great distance. A master of very distant associations - now they would say “a virtuoso of pulling an owl onto a globe.” It was he who invented, for example, the “Hamburg account”, which has since wandered through articles and books.

His biography in his youth was no less stormy. He wrote the book “Sentimental Journey” in 1924 in Berlin, where he fled from St. Petersburg, fearing arrest. Before that, he managed to visit Persia, participating in the First World War. Then he was tossed all over Russia - along with the revolution and the civil one.

After Berlin, he returned to the USSR, although he was never a Bolshevik, and lived quietly until old age, simultaneously writing books on literary criticism, fiction books, articles and film scripts.

The figure was colorful, so many writers copied him in their books, including Bulgakov (in The White Guard).

Now there are many naive people in LiveJournal who are looking forward to the revolution and the subsequent improvement of their own situation. I recommend Shklovsky’s book so that there are no unnecessary illusions.

The collapse of society is always scary and fraught with a huge number of deaths. Most people in civilian life died not from atrocities and executions, but from hunger and infectious diseases. Simply due to the collapse of the relevant life support systems. But people then lived much more autonomously - they had their own wells and toilets in their gardens, grew potatoes behind the house and did not use electricity.

Shklovsky describes everything accurately and calmly, without imposing any conclusions. Detached - as he loved. His political views were then vaguely moderate, the Bolsheviks - the only ones who at that time had their own metaphysical goal that went beyond the boundaries of the old world, which boiled down to the redistribution of power and property - were clearly incomprehensible to him and he described them as aliens, unknown creatures.

Some pages of the book seem to have been written today. A very useful read - after all, the current authorities of Russia (historical Russia) have clearly set a course for the reconstruction of that time - which means that not only 1913, but also 1918 will be reconstructed. Only without the Bolsheviks, who no longer exist. We've run out.

And another moral follows from what I read: when change is inevitable, it will happen sooner or later. Only the price will be very different. Pressure on the current government in order to force it to do something useful will cost much less than a revolution that will overthrow not only it, but also all the structures of everyday life.

Victor Borisovich Shklovsky

Before the revolution, I worked as an instructor in a reserve armored division - I was in a privileged position as a soldier.

I will never forget the feeling of that terrible oppression that I and my brother, who served as a staff clerk, experienced.

I remember the thieves’ run down the street after 8 o’clock and the three-month hopeless sitting in the barracks, and most importantly, the tram.

The city was turned into a military camp. “Semishniki” - that was the name of the soldiers of the military patrols because they, it was said, received two kopecks for each arrest - they caught us, drove us into the courtyards, and filled the commandant’s office. The reason for this war was the overcrowding of tram cars with soldiers and the refusal of soldiers to pay for travel.

The authorities considered this question a matter of honor. We, the mass of soldiers, responded to them with dull, embittered sabotage.

Maybe this is childishness, but I am sure that sitting without vacation in the barracks, where people taken away and cut off from work were rotting on bunks without anything to do, the melancholy of the barracks, the dark languor and anger of the soldiers at the fact that they were hunted in the streets - all this revolutionized the St. Petersburg garrison more than constant military failures and persistent, general talk about “treason.”

Special folklore, pitiful and characteristic, was created on tram themes. For example: a sister of mercy travels with the wounded, the general becomes attached to the wounded, insults his sister; then she takes off her cloak and finds herself in the uniform of the Grand Duchess; That’s what they said: “in uniform.” The general kneels and asks for forgiveness, but she does not forgive him. As you can see, folklore is still completely monarchical.

This story is attached either to Warsaw or to St. Petersburg.

It was told about the murder of a general by a Cossack who wanted to drag the Cossack off the tram and tore off his crosses. The murder over the tram, it seems, really happened in St. Petersburg, but I attribute the general to an epic treatment; At that time, generals did not yet ride trams, with the exception of retired poor people.

There was no agitation in the units; at least I can say this about my unit, where I spent all the time with the soldiers from five or six in the morning until the evening. I'm talking about party propaganda; but even in its absence, the revolution was somehow decided - they knew that it would happen, they thought that it would break out after the war.

There was no one to agitate in the units; there were few party people; if there were any, it was among the workers who had almost no connection with the soldiers; intelligentsia - in the most primitive sense of the word, i.e.<о>e<сть>everyone who had any education, at least two classes of a gymnasium, was promoted to officer and behaved, at least in the St. Petersburg garrison, no better, and perhaps worse, than regular officers; The ensign was not popular, especially the rear one, who clung his teeth to the reserve battalion. The soldiers sang about him:

Before, I was digging in the garden,

Now - your honor.

Of these people, many are only to blame for the fact that they too easily succumbed to the superbly choreographed drill of military schools. Many of them were subsequently sincerely devoted to the cause of the revolution, although they succumbed to its influence just as easily as they had previously easily become obsessed.

The story of Rasputin was widespread. I don't like this story; in the way it was told, the spiritual rotting of the people was visible. Post-revolutionary leaflets, all these “Grishka and his affairs” and the success of this literature showed me that for the very broad masses Rasputin was a kind of national hero, something like Vanka Klyuchnik.

But for various reasons, some of which directly scratched the nerves and created a reason for an outbreak, while others acted from within, slowly changing the psyche of the people, the rusty, iron hoops that held together the mass of Russia became tense.

The city's food supply kept getting worse; by the standards of that time it became bad. There was a shortage of bread, the bread shops had their tails, the shops on the Obvodny Canal had already begun to break down, and those lucky ones who managed to get the bread carried it home, holding it tightly in their hands, looking at it lovingly.

They bought bread from the soldiers; crusts and pieces disappeared from the barracks, which previously represented, along with the sour smell of captivity, the “local signs” of the barracks.

The cry of “bread” was heard under the windows and at the gates of the barracks, already poorly guarded by sentries and guards on duty, who freely let their comrades into the street.

The barracks, having lost faith in the old system, pressed by the cruel, but already uncertain hand of the authorities, wandered. By this time, a career soldier, and indeed a soldier between 22 and 25 years old, was a rarity. He was brutally and senselessly killed in the war.

Career non-commissioned officers were poured into the first echelons as ordinary privates and died in Prussia, near Lvov and during the famous “great” retreat, when the Russian army paved the entire earth with its corpses. The St. Petersburg soldier of those days was a dissatisfied peasant or a dissatisfied layman.

These people, not even dressed in gray overcoats, but simply hastily wrapped in them, were brought together into crowds, gangs and gangs, called reserve battalions.

In essence, the barracks became just brick pens, into which herds of human flesh were herded with more and more green and red draft papers.

The numerical ratio of command personnel to the mass of soldiers was, in all likelihood, no higher than that of overseers to slaves on slave ships.

And outside the walls of the barracks there were rumors that “the workers are going to speak out,” that “the Kolpino residents want to go to the State Duma on February 18.”

The half-peasant, half-philistine mass of soldiers had few connections with the workers, but all the circumstances developed in such a way that they created the possibility of some detonation.

I remember the days before. Dreamy conversations between instructor-drivers that it would be nice to steal an armored car, shoot at the police, and then abandon the armored car somewhere behind the outpost and leave a note on it: “Deliver to the Mikhailovsky Manege.” A very characteristic feature: caring for the car remains. Obviously, people were not yet confident that it was possible to overthrow the old system; they just wanted to make some noise. And they had been angry with the police for a long time, mainly because they were exempt from serving at the front.

I remember two weeks before the revolution, we, walking as a team (about two hundred people), hooted at a detachment of policemen and shouted: “Pharaohs, pharaohs!”

In the last days of February, people were literally eager to fight the police; detachments of Cossacks, sent out into the streets, drove around without bothering anyone, laughing good-naturedly. This greatly raised the rebellious mood of the crowd. They shot at Nevsky Prospect, killed several people, and the dead horse lay for a long time near the corner of Liteiny. I remembered it, it was unusual then.

On Znamenskaya Square, a Cossack killed a bailiff who hit a demonstrator with a saber.

There were hesitant patrols on the streets. I remember a confused machine-gun team with small machine guns on wheels (Sokolov’s machine gun), with machine-gun belts on the horses’ packs; obviously some kind of pack-machine-gun team. She stood on Basseynaya, corner of Baskovaya Street; the machine gun, like a small animal, pressed against the pavement, also embarrassed, a crowd surrounded him, not attacking, but somehow pressing with his shoulder, armless.

On Vladimirsky there were patrols of the Semenovsky regiment - Cain's reputation.

The patrols stood hesitantly: “We are nothing, we are like others.” The huge coercive apparatus prepared by the government was stalled. That night the Volynians could not stand it, they came to an agreement, at the command “to pray” they rushed to their rifles, destroyed the armory, took cartridges, ran out into the street, joined several small teams standing around, and set up patrols in the area of ​​their barracks - in the Liteiny part. By the way, the Volynians destroyed our guardhouse, located next to their barracks. The released prisoners reported to their superiors; Our officers assumed neutrality; they were also in a kind of opposition to “Evening Time”. The barracks was noisy and was waiting for them to drive her out into the street. Our officers said: “Do what you know.”