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Remembering Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov

This is a book in memory of the unforgettable Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov. His sudden death more than seven years ago shocked the reading public not only in Moscow and not only our Russia, but the entire large humanitarian world, and readers of the book will see that we still cannot come to terms with this death and even, as it were, into it believe. Sasha disappeared then at his very peak, at the turn of his new scientific and literary life. There was so much that had already been done and so much had just begun, for the continuation and development of which he was completely ready. At his then 67 years old, it was not death, but death. The kind of death that does not fit into consciousness. An excellent philologist and literary historian has just, unexpectedly for many of his readers, emerged as a strong writer. But the novel naturally grew out of his philological, scientific studies and interests; the philologist naturally turned into a prose writer. And so we lost both in one fateful moment. The loss was scientific and literary, but above all it was a human loss. Because before our eyes, an extremely free person internally, who lived a happy and beautiful life, disappeared from our world. This was truly a phenomenon of our modern Russian life and our culture - Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov.

What made up this memorial book? It opens with a biography written by Marietta Omarovna Chudakova together with Irina Evgenievna Gitovich for the philology encyclopedic dictionary of biographies of literary scholars, which has not yet been published. Here, in the biography, the history of the Chudakov family is highlighted, it is told about his very grandfather, who served as the prototype for the central character of the future novel. We are talking here about the long-term human and literary diary of A.P., which he kept almost every day and left to us as one of his works. From early entries in the diary of our historical 1956, we learn about his writing plan and can see how far the novel was maturing. An eighteen-year-old sophomore conceived “The History of My Contemporary” and its future structure – “using autobiographical material, but without giving a portrait of himself” – and the plan then matured for implementation forty years later. The diary for many years is huge, and our full acquaintance with it is yet to come; but a significant part of it was prepared with personal comments by M. O. Chudakova and published by her as an “appendix” in the latest edition of A. P.’s novel, recognized by the Booker Prize jury as the best Russian novel of the first decade of the 21st century (A darkness falls on the old steps. M., 2012. pp. 501–636). This publication is reproduced in an expanded form in this book. In 1970, A.P. met with Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, with whom he wrote down conversations about Chekhov and his “Chekhov’s Poetics” on many sheets of paper, intending to include them in a book of memoirs about his great teachers; this material (“Bakhtin on Chekhov’s Poetics”) was prepared and published by M. O. Chudakova in the 13th issue of the Tynianov Collection (2008, pp. 595–603); The text has been expanded for this book. In our collection, the author’s recording of a conversation with M. M. Bakhtin about Chekhov and “Chekhov’s Poetics” is accompanied by a note compiled by the author of these introductory notes. Bakhtin's notes complement the memoir book now prepared for publication about A. P.'s conversations over many years with the greatest philologists of the twentieth century, who became his scientific and personal teachers - S. M. Bondi, V. V. Vinogradov and V. B. Shklovsky . Finally - the poems of A.P., which he always wrote and collected them into a whole book - “The Cheerful Wolf”, publishing it at home in four copies, but even after the book he did not stop writing poetry, and began writing poetry in the same book at the same time include his own poetic inscriptions - dedicatory inscriptions to friends, which he always wrote in verse, turning them into a special genre where eccentric humor was uniquely combined with serious topics. Selected poems and scriptures by A.P. Chudakov are also present in this book. Some of them were included in the collection of poems, others appeared separately later. Notes for the novel prepared by the philologist-writer are also published; literary and creative themes are combined here with the socio-political themes that worried him.

The word of Alexander Pavlovich himself thus opens the book. Next are memoirs about him by his friends and readers, a word of love for him (“Memory”). Part of this memoir was direct responses to his death, which appeared in the “In memoriam” section in the magazine “New Literary Review” (2005, No. 75 and 2006, No. 77) and in the “Tynyanovsky Collection”, but most of these are memoirs-responses later ones, dating back to the present day. One article – about Chudakov’s novel by Andrei Nemzer – was written and published during the author’s lifetime; we introduce it here, into the posthumous. Sasha immediately appreciated it and wrote in his dedicatory letter to Nemzer: “to the author of the most precise words about this work.” The life of Alexander Pavlovich and his living image are reflected in numerous photographic materials, as well as in some autographs. This is also Sasha - his handwriting, his living hand.

Many of the materials that compiled the book were provided for it by M. O. Chudakova and M. A. Chudakova, many, especially in the personal part (“The Word of Alexander Chudakov”) are accompanied by personal comments by Marietta Omarovna; She also mainly selected the photographic material included in the book.

S. Bocharov

Marietta Chudakova, Irina Gitovich
Biography

Chudakov Alexander Pavlovich (1938, Shchuchinsk, Kokchetav region - 2005, Moscow). Born into a family of teachers. His father, Pavel Ivanovich Chudakov, a graduate of the history department of Moscow State University, was from the Tver province - from the village of Voskresensky, Bezhetsk district. In the 20s, his entire family - parents, their five sons and only daughter - lived in Moscow, on Pirogovka. Ch.'s paternal grandfather, Ivan Chudakov, who in the distant past came from the same household, but grew up in a peasant family, was from an artel of Tver men - gilders of church domes (for obvious reasons, only the most honest were recruited into such an artel). The family legend about the death of his grandfather, familiar to Ch. from childhood, was later included in his idyll novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps”:

When they blew up the temple - then they did it without hiding - the grandfather went to look. They tried to persuade him to stay at home, but he didn’t listen. I saw how the Temple fell from heaven to earth in three seconds; from the Stone Bridge one could see exactly that part of the large dome that he had been gilding for ten years.<…>

After the explosion, my grandfather fell ill and was ill; for a long time they could not determine why; A year later it turned out it was cancer. The family was sure - from this.

There are no graves of him and his wife left in Moscow; the circumstances of this are also described in the idyll novel:

...Anton loved to walk around his father’s places, which he had heard about so many times that it seemed he had already been here: along Usachevka, the square on Pirogovka, along the wall of the Novodevichy Convent. The paternal grandfather and grandmother were buried at the Novodevichy cemetery. But when, before the war, the uncles once got ready to visit the graves, in their place they saw a flat asphalt area. In the office, the indignant sons were shown a worn-out issue of "Evening Moscow", where in the corner there were several petite lines about the reconstruction of the cemetery, in connection with which the relatives of such and such plots are asked to be given a month's notice, etc. But the uncles did not catch the newspaper: Vasily Ivanovich was already near Magadan, Ivan Ivanovich, fired from everywhere, was knocking doorsteps in search of work, Alexey Ivanovich, a specialist in mining machines, went out of harm’s way to somewhere in the mines, and Anton’s father went to Kazakhstan.

Indeed, after the arrest (on charges of Trotskyism) of one of the brothers (Vasily spent ten years in a Soviet concentration camp), the summons to the Lubyanka of another (Andrei) and the dismissal from everywhere of the third - Ivan (only the fourth was not affected - Vladimir, who served far from Moscow) , the youngest, the future father of Ch., at that time a builder of the Moscow metro, made a life-saving decision: to go as far as possible from Moscow. This is how he ended up in Kazakhstan; soon, together with his young wife Evgenia Leonidovna Savitskaya, he settled in the city of Shchuchinsk (near the Borovoe resort), where Ch.’s maternal grandfather and grandmother were already located - Leonid Lvovich Savitsky (a priest who graduated from the Vilna Theological Seminary, but became not a priest, but a gymnasium teacher ) and Olga Petrovna, nee Naloch-Dlusskaya-Sklodovskaya.

Well prepared by his grandfather, the seven-year-old boy went straight to second grade.

The city was a place of exile during the Stalin era, so the level of teaching at the school, where the teachers included associate professors from Leningrad universities, turned out to be quite high. His mother taught chemistry at his school, his father taught history at a technical school. Both taught in their city for more than thirty years; Half the city was made up of their students.

The main influence on the formation of Ch.'s personality and worldview in childhood and adolescence was exerted by his grandfather (who later became the prototype of the main character of his novel), whose authority was unshakable in the eyes of the child. Ch. said that from early childhood he heard from his grandfather, when mentioning the name of Stalin, the same word - “Bandit!” - accompanied by an energetic wave of the hand. And my grandfather was not imprisoned in those days only because the city NKVD officer was his student; Therefore, I came to his son-in-law (Ch.’s father) with a warning - to somehow appease the old man: “We’ll put him in jail!”

At five or six years old, the grandson read the headlines of the latest newspapers to his grandfather. Lying on the sofa, the grandfather listened and most often summed it up with one word - “Nonsense!” The grandson read the following title, on rare occasions receiving the order: “Read the whole thing!” This is how the conclusion of the Special Commission headed by Burdenko was read - a fake, claiming that thousands of Poles in Katyn were shot by the Germans during the war. The grandfather summed it up - “Nonsense!”; the young grandson remembered this. Exiles went to their parents' house; frank political conversations were held in front of the boy - the hosts and guests trusted each other and for some reason were confident that the child understood that these conversations should not be taken beyond the threshold of the house. The specific atmosphere in the city and family gave Ch. such an understanding of the history of his country in the twentieth century that for him, unlike many of his peers - at least Muscovites - Khrushchev’s report at the 20th Congress was not a turning point: he already knew a lot about or guessed.

In 1954, Ch. graduated from school with a gold medal and, together with two classmates - his closest friends, also medal winners - for the first time in his life he went to Moscow, about which he had heard so much from his parents, who had left it involuntarily. Having successfully passed the interview (that year the competition for medalists had 25 people per place), he entered the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (note that both of his friends and classmates also entered on the first try - without the help of parents or anyone else - where wanted: one to the physics department of Moscow State University, the other to the geological exploration department: this is what they taught at school in Shchuchinsk, whose population was then only 20 thousand). My father’s help was needed only when it turned out that the successful applicant was 16 years old: Moscow University, unlike other universities, then accepted students from the age of 17. The father arrived in Moscow and went to see Rector Petrovsky with a request to enroll a 16-year-old applicant as an exception; the rector agreed. Ch. was perhaps the youngest on the course. Today, many of his classmates can still confirm that already in his first year he was among the best - those with a fairly broad cultural outlook and non-trivial thinking.

In the first semester, Ch. proved himself to be an excellent athlete (top ten at the university in swimming), but in the third year, when there were five training sessions per week, he was forced to make a choice in favor of science; his coach, the famous multiple national swimming champion Meshkov, assured that he was making a mistake: “You are a born breaststroke swimmer! I’m preparing you for the Spartakiad next year, and in three years for the Olympics!..”

In Moscow, he first of all rushed to the Great Hall of the Conservatory. Knowing classical music very well (listening to it on the radio in his hometown), he loved and felt it deeply. One of the very first entries in his diary, begun in his second year, in the spring of 1956:

9th of March. I listened to Beethoven's 7th and 8th symphonies in the evening (lucky me). What optimism, what fun, what enthusiasm! The third part of the seventh with its Slavic melodies...

The decision to keep a diary receives its motivation (like all his actions in the first Moscow years) - in the diary itself (see entry dated April 19, 1956)

His main activities (and main expenses - a meager scholarship and small parental transfers) in the first Moscow years were the Conservatory, the Moscow Art Theater and second-hand bookstores. Literally denying himself food for the sake of books and music, in his third year Ch. fell ill with a duodenal ulcer in such an acute form that he was taken straight from the X-ray room of the university clinic to the hospital and in his fourth year he was forced to take a year-long academic leave. (At the same time, he set himself the task of regaining his health and fitness. A few years later, when the word “walruses” had not yet appeared, he took up winter swimming and at the very first competition on the Moscow River he took third place - after professional athletes - masters of sports .)

Every day after lectures, Ch. certainly goes around five shops in the center of Moscow - collecting mainly philological literature of the 1900-1920s (sometimes adding to it - within his means! - the philosophy and poetry of the Silver Age, which does not yet have such a name), having early understood (by some inspiration) that the Soviet literary criticism recommended at the philological department has little relation to science; by the end of the fifth year he had thoroughly mastered the works of Tynyanov, Shklovsky and Eikhenbaum; no more than three or four of his fellow students could boast of this in those years.

A typical diary entry from 1958:

June 19. <…> Today's trip to the second-hand bookstores was a success. But on Kuznetsky they literally took Mandelstam from under his nose!.. “I couldn’t bear the grief”...

(Later the initial “I.” was inserted. We were talking about I. Mandelstam’s book “On the Character of Gogol’s Style,” published in 1902, which he subsequently acquired. It was possible to buy O. Mandelstam’s books, unlike Gumilyov’s books, in used bookstores at that time impossible - M. Ch.)

His main strengths are devoted to philology. He studies at the Russian language department; begins to be published (Style and language of Chekhov’s story “Ionych” // Russian language at school, 1959, No. 1); writes a thesis on Chekhov's style under the guidance of Academician V.V. Vinogradov.

Already in his student years, Ch., not being a dissident (although, naturally, dissidents were part of the Chudakov family circle of friends), faced pressure from the Soviet government on his scientific life. As a 5th year student, he was invited to the First International Conference on Poetics, held in August 1960 in Warsaw - it was supposed to become a real scientific event: the study of poetics in the countries of the “socialist camp” was only being revived after the liquidation of the “formal school”. Then Ch. for the first time didn't release abroad. From that time on he became restricted from traveling(of course, as was customary, without explanation). In the last years of his life, in conversations at home, Ch. recalled precisely this first incident, which deeply traumatized him: “If I had gone to this first conference on poetry, which I was so passionate about, what an impetus it could have been in my scientific studies!.. »

In those years, it was impossible to enroll in graduate school immediately after the University, despite the recommendation of the Academic Council: Khrushchev demanded that those recommended for graduate school, along with all graduates, work for two years before starting scientific studies. As assigned, A.P. began teaching Russian at the newly opened Peoples' Friendship University - and was perhaps the first to actively use language tools, achieving great success; admired the linguistic talent of a student from one of the African countries - at a New Year's party in 1961, he recited Pushkin's poems by heart without a single spelling error...

A year later, in the summer of 1962, with the assistance of academician. Vinogradov, the vice-rector of Moscow State University accepted Ch.’s documents (having previously unconditionally refused this) and allowed him to take exams for graduate school; A.P. was made an indelible impression by the behavior of the vice-rector: the official, who did not look in his direction during the first visit, after the academician’s call, came out to him from behind the table with the words: “Why have you completely forgotten us?!..”.

Under the scientific guidance of V.V. Vinogradov, Ch.’s candidate’s dissertation “The Evolution of Chekhov’s Prose Style” was written (Moscow, 1966).

In 1962, Ch. met V.B. Shklovsky and, having immediately aroused his interest (primarily as an expert on Opoyaz) and undoubted sympathy, all subsequent years, until the last days of Shklovsky’s life, met with him; Without fear of exaggeration, it can be argued that Ch.’s memoirs “I Ask Shklovsky” (Literary Review, 1990, No. 6) are perhaps the best essay on Shklovsky’s personality. Subsequently, in his preface to Shklovsky’s collection “The Hamburg Account: Articles – Memoirs – Essays” (Moscow, 1990) entitled “The First Two Decades”, an outline of the most fruitful period of Shklovsky’s scientific creativity is given.

A serious step in the study of the “formal school” was the work (together with E. A. Toddes and M. O. Chudakova) on an extensive commentary on the collection of articles by Tynyanov - and the grueling four-year struggle for its publication ( Yu. N. Tynyanov. Poetics. History of literature. Movie. M., 1977); it was preceded by the publication of a collection of articles by Tynyanov “Pushkin and His Contemporaries” (M., 1968; comments by Ch. and A. L. Grishunin). Work on the history of Russian philological science continued throughout the following years; Subsequently, in 1976–2003, 4 volumes of “Selected Works” by V.V. Vinogradov were published with articles and comments by Ch.

Ch. was also engaged in criticism of the modern literary process; the first major work on modern literature is “The Art of the Whole: Notes on the Modern Story” (New World, 1963, No. 2; co-authored with M. O. Chudakova, since 1957 - his wife).

In 1964, invited to participate in the beginning academic publication of Chekhov, Ch. left full-time graduate school and became an employee of the IMLI, where he worked until the end of his days. At the same time, he lectured at Moscow State University, at the Pedagogical Institute. Lenin, at the Literary Institute, and in recent years at the Moscow Art Theater School.

A.P. Chudakov’s first book, “Chekhov’s Poetics,” was published in November 1971; in it, in addition to the new concept of Chekhov’s narrative - the place in it of the point of view of the author and the hero, the idea of the fundamental non-selection and non-hierarchical nature of details in Chekhov was developed and the concept was introduced into scientific circulation accidents- in contrast to the many years of confidence of researchers that every gun in Chekhov shoots. In an article by a prominent party official (part-time Chekhov scholar) G. Berdnikov “On Chekhov’s poetics and the principles of its research” (Questions of Literature, 1972, No. 5, pp. 124–141), the book was subjected to ideological criticism (in the same year it was highly praised M. M. Bakhtin, in a conversation with the author, called “the best book about Chekhov and in general one of the best books on philology in recent times”; the book received recognition from the world of Czech studies and was translated into English in 1983). This was followed by an unspoken ban (in effect for a decade) on the publication of any line by the author about Chekhov in the two main Soviet literary journals. The condition for defending a doctoral dissertation at IMLI was that the author renounced his concept. Without giving up, but, on the contrary, having developed it, Ch. defended his dissertation “Chekhov’s Artistic System: Genetic and Psychological Aspects” in 1982 at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (one of the opponents, M. L. Semanova, told those gathered after the defense at the department Russian Literature of the Faculty of Philology, as in 1978, the editors of the magazine “Russian Literature” invited her to write a review of Chekhovian literature over the past eight years, setting one condition - not to mention Chudakov’s book. “How can I not mention it if this is the most striking phenomenon of Chekhovian literature for these years?" objected M.L. The condition was confirmed to her. She refused to write a review).

In 1986, 15 years after “Chekhov’s Poetics,” Ch.’s continuation monograph “Chekhov’s World” was published. Emergence and approval." The book was dedicated to the memory of Ch.’s teacher, academician V.V. Vinogradov. According to the bibliography of Ch.'s works on Chekhov over these fifteen years, one can literally see the researcher's path to it step by step. As a member of the Chekhov group IMLI, which in those years was preparing the first academic collection of Chekhov's works and letters, Chekhov worked extensively and fruitfully on textual criticism and scientific commentary on volumes of Chekhov's works, which gave his theoretical constructions additional credibility and depth. For some of the volumes he wrote exemplary prefaces to the commentaries. Over the same years, he published a large number of scientific articles and several prefaces to Chekhov’s mass publications. And each of these works brought closer the creation of the monograph “Chekhov’s World,” the innovation of which began with the title. No one before Ch., it seems, tried to give this phrase, stable for literary studies, but quite freely used in scientific works, the status of a scientific term (the world of the writer, according to Ch.’s definition, is “an original and unique vision of things and spiritual phenomena captured verbally” ( p. 3)). No one before Ch. had tried to trace the very process of the “emergence and establishment” of this world in the light of the main engine of literary evolution – “artistic expediency”, behind which one could see the historically based view of the researcher on the very genesis of literature. The work on “Chekhov’s World” continued, deepened and brought to a new level both the very concept of Chekhov’s work, introduced into scientific circulation by “Chekhov’s Poetics,” and the methodology for analyzing the literary text proposed by the researcher. Chekhov himself believed that from the point of view of the chronology and genesis of Chekhov’s work, his new book should precede the previous one. However, the fear of presenting the writer’s creative path as a “pre-preparation” for something pre-designated, in the form of a purposeful evolution without side and dead-end branches, forced us to abandon this heuristically tempting idea.

He chose the path of research that his teacher, Academician Vinogradov, considered the most fruitful. If a literary work can be studied in two aspects – “functional-immanent” (system-synchronic) and “retrospective-projective” (historical-genetic), then the most fruitful, according to Vinogradov, is research that combines these approaches in the form of successive stages. But Ch., following his personal experience of literature as a special integrity of the process of artistic knowledge, which he keenly felt precisely as a writer, had to go further and combine these two types of research, considering them as they are present in this living process. Impeccable scientific analysis and powerful literary intuition are at the forefront of Ch.’s own scientific thinking. This is also felt in his personal style - scientific precision of presentation with breakthroughs into the style of a different, direct experience of the literary process, in formulations that required the experience and talent of a writer. At the junction of these two stylistic streams there is a huge concentration of the meanings of Chekhov's eccentric concept. These are many of the unexpected “lateral” ideas of Chekhov that are so productive for the future study of Chekhov, which he seemingly accidentally drops, obeying the logic of his personal feeling for the research material - about the sense of the “norm” of criticism during his lifetime, which among the writer’s contemporary critics is much more lively and correct than his descendants, about Chekhov’s poetry at the level of the poetics of the text. At the same time, Ch. himself not only produced ideas, illuminated by his own insights, but studied lifetime criticism, like a professional bibliographer, having looked All Russian newspapers of Chekhov's time (1880–1904). The question of the origins of Chekhov’s world, the factors influencing the formation of this artistic world, thoughts about mass literature that shaped the phenomenon of Chekhov - all this today appears before us as a self-developing school of scientific Czech studies.

In the ten-page preface to “Chekhov’s World”, Ch., in fact, built a general model of a universal way of describing the “writer’s world”, its main components: this is “a person, his material environment - natural and man-made, his inner world, his actions” ( p. 3). At the same time, the description of the world in these parameters presupposes the clarification of the laws of construction of contents, based on which one could say that such and such a phenomenon is characteristic specifically for the world of X.

Even in “Poetics” he put forward, and in “Chekhov’s World” he developed and strengthened the system of arguments for his main idea, which he considered fundamental for Chekhov’s world - the idea accidents, going back to the writer’s worldview. Chekhov's artistic system, which was already considered during the writer's lifetime as a lack of his talent, fixing first of all the irregular, as if even unnecessary - that is, actually accidental, in fact expanded the possibilities of art. Ch. showed that the episodes, details, and actions of people depicted by Chekhov are connected somewhere in another, “non-Euclidean” space. Chekhov's guns shoot in all cases, but their bullets are more like long-range shells exploding somewhere beyond the horizon, so that only a powerful and continuous roar reaches us.

With such an expanded understanding of artistic expediency itself, a phenomenon receives the right to be depicted not only in its essential features, but also in accompanying, transient, accidental ones - “those that can always arise in a living, undifferentiated flow of being” (p. 364). The world he depicts looks naturally chaotic, thereby demonstrating the complexity of the real world, about which no final judgment can be made. The individually random in Chekhov's world has an independent existential value and an equal right to embodiment along with the rest - significant and small, material and spiritual, ordinary and sublime. Ch. thus formulated the features of the unique, not repeated after him, thinking of Chekhov the writer, bringing him closer to the scientific thinking that was relevant for the time, underlying the new picture of the world that took shape at the turn of the century.

Ch. examines in his two books and many articles about Chekhov of this time the process of the emergence of a new type of object image in his work. Ch. was the first to draw attention to the importance of the study objective world literature:

The birth of an artistic object is the objectification of the artist’s ideas, it is a process where the inner world collides with the external world penetrating into it, and from the moment of this penetration bears its clear traces. In this clash, the real-empirical has an advantage - the writer can only speak the language of a given objective world, only in this way can he be understood. Therefore, every writer is naturally social: anything transtemporal and eternal is embodied by him in the eternal guise of the era to which he belongs.

The appeal to the objectivity and randomness of Chekhov's world raised the question of the meaning of Chekhov's appeal to everyday life as a form and philosophy of life, which remained and still remains not entirely clear to many of Chekhov’s readers. Ch. turns to the origins of plot-compositional principles new to literature, used by Chekhov, to the question of the “external and internal world”, comparing the plot and plot in Chekhov, he poses in a completely new way on the basis of this the problem of Chekhov’s hero as the problem of the “average person” " Finally, he outlines the connection between the artistic world and the biography of the writer, opening the way for the creation of a full-fledged biography of Chekhov. Each of these topics not only could and should have been developed into an independent monograph, but contains a huge number of seemingly random, lateral, but unusually productive ideas for the further study of Chekhov and Chekhov’s literary era, which still require their own researcher. Ch., in essence, outlines in this book and his Chekhovian the possible evolution of the paradigm of scientific Czech studies.

Chekhov's methodology is based on his excellent knowledge of the methods and essence of academic schools of literary criticism, the remarkable intuition of a scientist and writer, a thorough knowledge of the literature about Chekhov that preceded him, and knowledge of the biography and era of the writer in facts and documents. Ch. proceeded from the fact that Chekhov’s very path to literature (through mass literature and the small press) was unique for Russian literature. The book contains many brilliant pages devoted to the analysis of this literature, of which Chekhov was a reader and “promoter.” Considering this experimental field of the writer, the researcher puts forward a number of interesting hypotheses and gives even more impetus to future researchers. This was a new type of artistic and philosophical comprehension of the world of the writer, which not only did not ignore everyday life, things, but contained them in a meditative consciousness that was built above them. These words open up the possibility of a new special monograph on Chekhov, which has not yet been written by anyone, but could explain many of Chekhov’s unsolved mysteries and relieve the writer of many claims - in particular, the absence of a novel in his work, which Chekhov was never able to write. Obviously, we are still only on the threshold of comprehending the essence of the type of Chekhov’s thinking, its genesis and the ways it opens for the emergence and establishment of such consciousness in literature.

In 1987, the Prosveshcheniye publishing house published the biography Anton Pavlovich Chekhov: A Book for Students (republished in 2013 by the Vremya publishing house with the addition of photo illustrations), where Chekhov’s Taganrog childhood and adolescence appeared in an unusual light - in a sea, port city, where “at the height of summer navigation, steamships and sailing ships from all over the world were crowded in the harbor.” Basically, he prepared for publication a complete annotated bibliography of Chekhov’s lifetime criticism. He wrote several memoirs about his senior colleagues - his teachers: “Listening to Bondi”, “Learning from Vinogradov”, “Asking Shklovsky”, etc.

The entire Russian 19th century was in the field of vision of the scientist; but the main object of his attention, along with Chekhov, was Pushkin; While studying the poetics of his prose, Ch. also dreamed of, if not creating the whole (realizing the overwhelming task), then laying a methodological foundation for what he called total comment to "Eugene Onegin".

Chudakov Alexander Pavlovich

CHUDAKOV Alexander Pavlovich- (b. 1938) Russian literary critic, Doctor of Philology (1983). The focus is on the poetics of Russian literature of the 19th century and the history of Russian literary criticism. Books: Chekhov's Poetics (1971), Chekhov's World (1986), The Word is a Thing World (1992) and others... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Chudakov Alexander Pavlovich- (b. 1938), literary critic, Doctor of Philology (1982). Employee of the Institute of World Literature named after. M. Gorky. He studied the work of A. P. Chekhov (“Chekhov’s Poetics”, 1971), the objective artistic vision (“material language”) of Russian classics: ... ... encyclopedic Dictionary

Chudakov, Alexander- Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov Russian literary critic and writer Date of birth: February 2, 1938 Place of birth: Shchuchinsk, Kazakh SSR ... Wikipedia

Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov- ... Wikipedia

Chudakov A.- Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov Russian literary critic and writer Date of birth: February 2, 1938 Place of birth: Shchuchinsk, Kazakh SSR ... Wikipedia

Chudakov A.P.- Alexander Pavlovich Chudakov Russian literary critic and writer Date of birth: February 2, 1938 Place of birth: Shchuchinsk, Kazakh SSR ... Wikipedia

Chudakov- Chudakov is a Russian surname, derived from the word “eccentric.” Famous bearers: Chudakov, Alexander Evgenievich Russian experimental physicist, academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Chudakov, Alexander Pavlovich Russian literary critic and writer.... ... Wikipedia

Chudakov A.P.- CHUDAKOV Alexander Pavlovich (b. 1938), literary critic, doctor of philology. Sciences (1982). Employee of the Institute of World Literature named after. M. Gorky. Research creativity of A.P. Chekhov (Chekhov's Poetics, 1971), subject matter. vision (material language) Russian. classics: Word... ... Biographical Dictionary

Aksenov, Vasily Pavlovich- Wikipedia has articles about other people with the same surname, see Aksyonov. Not to be confused with the writer Vasily Ivanovich Aksenov. Vasily Aksyonov ... Wikipedia

Books

, Chudakov Alexander Pavlovich. All living members were invited to participate in choosing the laureate of the Booker of the Decade competition... Buy for 644 rubles
Darkness falls on the old steps, Chudakov Alexander Pavlovich. Alexander Chudakov (1938-2005), an outstanding Russian philologist, wrote the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps,”…

S. Bocharov

Marietta Chudakova, Irina Gitovich

Biography

After the explosion, my grandfather fell ill and was ill; for a long time they could not determine why; A year later it turned out it was cancer. The family was sure - from this.

There are no graves of him and his wife left in Moscow; the circumstances of this are also described in the idyll novel:

GREAT MAN, INTERLOCUTOR OF THE GREATS
Alexander CHUDAKOV died G The death of Sasha Chudakov shocked the reading... more than one Moscow and more than one Russia: they are calling from St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Hamburg. We lost not only a great philologist and a writer who recently appeared to us - this was a phenomenon of modern Russian life.
Alexander Pavlovich felt like an academic person and wanted to keep the tradition of not only his fathers - his philological grandfathers. He looked up to them in his own philology, he talked with them for years and wrote down these conversations. There is a book that few people have seen - it was printed in Seoul when A.P. I taught there for several years, in the amount of 10 copies - “I’m listening. I'm studying. I'm asking. Three memoirs." Conversations with Bondi, V.V. Vinogradov and Viktor Shklovsky, which took place over many years and were recorded on the same day. Conversations populated by people and events over half a century - from the 20s to the 70s. With his inquisitive activity A.P. connected eras.
The last thing he did not have time to complete was a memoir book of such conversations. In addition to the names already mentioned - with M.M. Bakhtin and Lydia Ginzburg. I didn’t have time as I wanted, but the Seoul book exists, and it should be republished in more than ten copies.
I didn’t have time - it’s strange to say this when two weeks ago we were talking to him cheerfully about Onegin’s “beaver collar”. A.P. wrote a study about him on the occasion of a new idea - a total, as he called it, commentary on “Eugene Onegin” (he read a course of lectures on this topic for several years). We all (almost) “intend to live” and do not intend to die frivolously - A.P. as if he was like that in a special way. Some kind of cheerful, one might even venture to say - an optimistic note distinguished him, with a constant mood for a new task - and his death does not fit into his consciousness. It is death that is not just death. There was so much life in him, with what noise she left him...
An anecdote from the not-so-recent past: at the very beginning of perestroika, we were with him in Amsterdam, and in a student club there, a student there, having learned that Chudakov himself, the author of that same “Chekhov’s Poetics,” was next to him, was so stunned that he couldn’t could have expressed it differently - he said: “Let me offer you a marijuana cigarette.” Sasha said then that for the first time he understood what fame was.
But perhaps what was said about cheerful optimism is an external impression? “And they all died” is the final chapter of Alexander Chudakov’s idyll novel, called Blok’s line. The hero of the novel, a personal hero, in the last chapter is immersed in the thought of death, and the original title of the novel was “The Death of Grandfather.” The novel was a revelation not only for me. I knew the memoirist Chudakov, but I didn’t suspect the writer. And I began to recognize the philologist with his favorite theme of the objective world in literature (with that same beaver collar) while reading the novel. There is so much of an objective world in it - not literary, but taken from childhood, biographical. Countless details of the life of the exiled population in the town on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan, where the author spent his war and post-war childhood.
In general, the novel is historical. Not only a picture of the era in abundance of detail, but evidence. Evidence of how Russian life was preserved within Soviet life in that semi-exiled environment, about which I do not know of any other such literary evidence.
Grandfather the priest is the first and last word of the novel. “Grandfather was very strong.” In the first chapter in arm wrestling, he puts the hand of a blacksmith. I saw Sasha working with a crowbar - breaking the ice. I saw him building a house with his own hands. The house (dacha) was three-story, Gothic, like a cathedral. One friend, seeing him, said: “Self-portrait.”
A tall, heavy, big man - this image was also included in the work of the philologist. Physical power, probably passed down from his grandfather-priest. Alexander Chudakov could have become a professional swimmer - the famous post-war swimmer and coach Leonid Meshkov encouraged him to pursue this career. If I didn’t go, I went to philology.
Three years ago we were in Mikhailovsky and swam a lot in the pleasantly clean Soroti. He, of course, pulled away and generously waited. Coming out of the water, he put on a white suit and tie and made a report. That was the style-man.

Sergey BOCHAROV

06.10.2005

Alexander Chudakov is a famous Russian writer and literary critic. Philologist. He is considered one of the country's largest researchers of the work of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. He dedicated many books and monographs to him. At the same time, he also wrote several of his own works, the most famous of which is the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps.”

Biography of the writer

Alexander Chudakov was born in 1938. He was born in the small resort town of Shchuchinsk with a population of only about 45 thousand people. It is located on the territory of modern Kazakhstan.

From a distant Asian republic, Alexander Chudakov moved to the capital after school. Here he entered Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1960. Received a diploma with honors from the Faculty of Philology.

A few years after graduation, he got a job at the Institute of World Literature. At the same time, he began teaching at his native Moscow State University. Give lectures to students on the history of Russian literature.

Scientific work

All this time, Alexander Chudakov was engaged in scientific work. He wrote monographs and articles for literary journals. In 1983 he defended his doctoral dissertation, becoming a Doctor of Philological Sciences. Most of his research was related to the work and influence on literature of the Russian writer of the turn of the 19th-20th centuries - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov.

During perestroika, the talent and knowledge of the hero of our article turned out to be in demand abroad. And this is not surprising. After all, Chekhov, of whom Chudakov was an expert, is considered one of the most famous Russian writers abroad, along with Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy.

Therefore, there have always been many people in Western countries who wanted to listen to a course of lectures on Chekhov. So the biography of Alexander Chudakov was successful - he began teaching a course in Russian literature at universities in the USA and Europe. Over time, he became one of the prominent members of the International Chekhov Society.

Literary studies

Chudakova released his first large-scale work, dedicated to Anton Chekhov, back in 1971. It was a monograph entitled "Chekhov's Poetics". In 1983 it was translated into English and published in the West.

At that time, the author was just over 30. Despite this, he created a profound work of literary criticism, which received international recognition and the rejection of conservative Soviet scientists. Many of the statements that Chudakov made in this work, as well as in his next study, “Chekhov's World: Emergence and Affirmation” in 1986, were not indisputable. But at the same time they determined the path of development of Czech studies for many years to come. It was Chudakov who first proposed meticulous methods for describing a writer’s narrative system. He is the author of the concept of the “material world” of a work, with the help of which he characterized many of Chekhov’s stories.

The main thesis of Alexander Chudakov in his books is devoted to the “random” organization of the entire poetics of such a great writer as Chekhov. This statement still causes much controversy among researchers and philologists.

He outlined his views on the problem of “random” organization and the “material” world in detail in his study “Word - Thing - World: from Pushkin to Tolstoy,” which was published in 1992.

He also wrote about two hundred articles on the history of Russian literature. He carefully collected, prepared and commented on collections of works by Yuri Tynyanov and Viktor Shklovsky. The first is a Russian formalist who wrote the novels “Kyukhlya”, “The Death of Wazir-Mukhtar” and “Pushkin” (unfinished). The second is a playwright who managed to compete with Mikhail Bulgakov.

Books for schoolchildren

In 2013, his monograph “Anton Pavlovich Chekhov” was published. It is primarily dedicated to high school students in Russian schools.

In it, Doctor Chudakov introduces young people to the fate and main events in the life of Chekhov. The book tells in detail about the impressions of the writer’s childhood and youth. About how it happened that from an ordinary employee of a humor magazine, in a few years, a great writer, known throughout the world, grew up. Today we can rightfully say that he opened a new page in world art.

Roman Chudakova

It is noteworthy that Chudakov was not only a literary critic and researcher. He also wrote his own works. In 2000, the literary magazine “Znamya” published the novel “Darkness Falls on the Old Steps” by Alexander Chudakov. His own artistic work.

The main character of this work is a historian who tells others amazing episodes about how people lived in pre-revolutionary Russia. How everything changed after the revolution. What did Russia's participation in the wars of the 20th century lead to? These stories are constantly replaced by no less fascinating and interesting discussions in which the hero embarks on together with his interlocutors.

The novel "Darkness Falls on the Old Steps" was recognized as the best work of Russian literature in the first decade of the 21st century. The jury of the prestigious literary competition "Russian Booker" gave him such a high rating. This is a unique book that makes you cry and laugh at the same time. This is what readers say about Alexander Chudakov in reviews. He has already captivated many with his talent and dedication.