presented to Moscow a new performance by the French choreographer Joseph Nadge "Sherry Brandy".
The productions of the director of the National Choreographic Center of Orleans, Joseph Nudge, often travel to Moscow and receive awards from time to time. His new work was commissioned by the Chekhov Festival and is partly connected with the name of Chekhov: his story “Swan Song” - a monologue of an old actor in an empty theater hall - is taken as the literary basis. Two poems by Osip Mandelstam serve as a kind of framework for the performance: at the beginning it sounds “A wolfhound century is throwing itself on my shoulders”, at the end - “Sherry brandy”. As things progress, it becomes clear that there is another literary source - the stories of Varlam Shalamov, one of them is also called “Sherry Brandy”:
“The poet was dying. Large hands, swollen with hunger, with white, bloodless fingers and dirty, long-grown nails lay on his chest, not hiding from the cold. Previously, he put them in his bosom, on his naked body, but now there was too little warmth there. The mittens were long gone. stole; theft required only impudence - they stole in broad daylight. A dim electric sun, fouled by flies and chained with a round grating, was attached high under the ceiling. The light fell on the poet’s feet - he lay, as if in a box, in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. From time to time, the fingers moved, clicked like castanets, and felt a button, a loop, a hole in the peacoat, brushed away some rubbish and stopped again. The poet had been dying for so long that he ceased to understand that he was dying."
It is Shalamov’s story and the story of the death of Osip Mandelstam, to a much greater extent than Chekhov’s works, that determine the intonation and mood of the play Joseph Naja. He himself, when asked how the associative chain “Chekhov-Mandelshtam-Shalamov” arose, answers this way:
– It happened completely naturally. I have been thinking about Mandelstam for a long time - he is a poet whom I have read a lot and know his life well. I have been haunted by this image for a long time, this moment in his life, when he was in prison for the first time, he was given something salty to eat, and then starved and thirsty. This extreme experience of an artist, a poet, who is on the verge of life and death, has long made me think about creating some kind of work. I started reading Chekhov's texts, intending to find my solution there. I got to see "Swan Song". This actor, who in the darkness of the theater ponders what role he can still play - some more specific sign was needed that would connect Chekhov and Mandelstam. It was Chekhov's book "Sakhalin Island". And I began to ask myself the question: what inner need made him go there, to Sakhalin Island, to observe and write about it? As a person who works for the theater, everything that comes his way, he inevitably imagines how it can be transferred to the stage. Chekhov never put this in any of his plays, but I did. Several motifs are connected together, forming a core from which a bridge naturally extends to the next element. And so I reached Shalamov. And there I again find “Sherry Brandy,” a story about the death of Mandelstam in the Gulag.
The play is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to the description of this poetic state of the human soul. The second part is called “Theater in the Gulag,” and this part is more connected with Shalamov’s texts, with Shalamov’s experience.
A theater columnist for Novaya Gazeta speaks about Joseph Naja's performance. Elena Dyakova:
– I really liked him. Firstly, there are still theatrical qualities. Secondly, it’s been a long time since anyone spoke so seriously in Russia. And what he told us at the meeting that there is now a great anesthesia of all things and he, as an artist, is against it - this is important. Chekhov, Mandelstam and Shalamov rise into this tragic context quite naturally - this is the unity of Russian literature. And the finale of his play, where the execution of a martyr is carried out under the early, 1913, if I’m not mistaken, year, maximum for Mandelstam, hedonistic verses, this, it seems to me, is addressed to today’s Russia. And besides the connotations with Shalamov, after all, in general, what remains of “The Cherry Orchard”? Sherry brandy and sommelier competition. This is what we are seeing.
Ballet columnist for Novaya Gazeta Ekaterina Vasenina agrees with my colleague:
- The performance is amazing. The images of violence are handled with chilling conviction.
Ekaterina Vasenina said that one of the participants in the play “Sherry Brandy” devoted almost an entire day in Moscow to Anna Politkovskaya:
– Before the performance, she visited the house on Lesnaya, where Politkovskaya was killed, and visited the editorial office of Novaya Gazeta, Anna Stepanovna’s office, just to see where she worked. I think this was due to her work on the play "Sherry Brandy".
Depiction of man and camp life in V. Shalamov’s collection “Kolyma Stories”
The existence of a common man in the unbearably harsh conditions of camp life is the main theme of the collection “Kolyma Stories” by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov. It conveys in a surprisingly calm tone all the sorrows and torments of human suffering. A very special writer in Russian literature, Shalamov was able to convey to our generation all the bitterness of human deprivation and moral loss. Shalamov's prose is autobiographical. He had to endure three terms in the camps for anti-Soviet agitation, 17 years in prison in total. He courageously withstood all the tests fate had prepared for him, was able to survive during this difficult time in these hellish conditions, but fate prepared for him a sad end - being of sound mind and full sanity, Shalamov ended up in an insane asylum, while he continued to write poetry, although I saw and heard poorly.
During Shalamov’s lifetime, only one of his stories, “Stlannik,” was published in Russia. It describes the characteristics of this northern evergreen tree. However, his works were actively published in the West. What's amazing is the height at which they are written. After all, these are real chronicles of hell, conveyed to us in the calm voice of the author. There is no prayer, no scream, no anguish. His stories contain simple, concise phrases, a short summary of the action, and only a few details. They have no background to the lives of the heroes, their past, no chronology, no description of the inner world, no author’s assessment. Shalamov’s stories are devoid of pathos; everything in them is very simple and sparing. The stories contain only the most important things. They are extremely condensed, usually taking only 2-3 pages, with a short title. The writer takes one event, or one scene, or one gesture. In the center of the work there is always a portrait, the executioner or the victim, in some stories both. The last phrase in the story is often compressed, laconic, like a sudden spotlight, it illuminates what happened, blinding us with horror. It is noteworthy that the arrangement of the stories in the cycle is of fundamental importance for Shalamov; they must follow exactly the way he placed them, that is, one after the other.
Shalamov's stories are unique not only in their structure, they have artistic novelty. His detached, rather cold tone gives the prose such an unusual effect. There is no horror in his stories, no overt naturalism, no so-called blood. The horror in them is created by the truth. Moreover, with a truth completely unthinkable given the time in which he lived. “Kolyma Tales” is a terrible evidence of the pain that people caused to other people just like them.
The writer Shalamov is unique in our literature. In his stories, he, as the author, suddenly becomes involved in the narrative. For example, in the story “Sherry Brandy” there is a narration from a dying poet, and suddenly the author himself includes his deep thoughts in it. The story is based on a semi-legend about the death of Osip Mandelstam, which was popular among prisoners in the Far East in the 30s. Sherry-Brandy is both Mandelstam and himself. Shalamov said directly that this is a story about himself, that there is less violation of historical truth here than in Pushkin’s Boris Godunov. He was also dying of hunger, he was on that Vladivostok transit, and in this story he includes his literary manifesto, and talks about Mayakovsky, Tyutchev, Blok, he turns to human erudition, even the name itself refers to this. “Sherry-Brandy” is a phrase from O. Mandelstam’s poem “I’ll tell you from the last one...”. In context it sounds like this:
"...I'll tell you from the last
Directness:
It's all just nonsense, sherry brandy,
My angel…"
The word “bredney” here is an anagram for the word “brandy”, and in general Sherry Brandy is a cherry liqueur. In the story itself, the author conveys to us the feelings of the dying poet, his last thoughts. First, he describes the pitiful appearance of the hero, his helplessness, hopelessness. The poet here dies for so long that he even ceases to understand it. His strength leaves him, and now his thoughts about bread are weakening. Consciousness, like a pendulum, leaves him at times. He then ascends somewhere, then returns again to the harsh present. Thinking about his life, he notes that he was always in a hurry to get somewhere, but now he is glad that there is no need to rush, he can think more slowly. For Shalamov’s hero, the special importance of the actual feeling of life, its value, and the impossibility of replacing this value with any other world becomes obvious. His thoughts rush upward, and now he is talking “... about the great monotony of achievements before death, about what doctors understood and described earlier than artists and poets.” While dying physically, he remains alive spiritually, and gradually the material world disappears around him, leaving room only for the world of inner consciousness. The poet thinks about immortality, considering old age only an incurable disease, only an unsolved tragic misunderstanding that a person could live forever until he gets tired, but he himself is not tired. And lying in the transit barracks, where everyone feels the spirit of freedom, because there is a camp in front, a prison behind, he remembers the words of Tyutchev, who, in his opinion, deserved creative immortality.
"Blessed is he who has visited this world
His moments are fatal.”
The “fatal moments” of the world are correlated here with the death of the poet, where the inner spiritual universe is the basis of reality in “Sherry Brandy.” His death is also the death of the world. At the same time, the story says that “these reflections lacked passion,” that the poet had long been overcome by indifference. He suddenly realized that all his life he had lived not for poetry, but for poetry. His life is an inspiration, and he was glad to realize this now, before his death. That is, the poet, feeling that he is in such a borderline state between life and death, is a witness to these very “fateful minutes.” And here, in his expanded consciousness, the “last truth” was revealed to him, that life is inspiration. The poet suddenly saw that he was two people, one composing phrases, the other discarding the unnecessary. There are also echoes of Shalamov’s own concept here, in which life and poetry are one and the same thing, that you need to discard the world creeping onto paper, leaving what can fit on this paper. Let's return to the text of the story, realizing this, the poet realized that even now he is composing real poems, even if they are not written down, not published - this is just vanity of vanities. “The best thing is that which is not written down, that which was composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative joy that he feels and which cannot be confused with anything, proves that the poem was created, that the beautiful was created.” The poet notes that the best poems are those born unselfishly. Here the hero asks himself whether his creative joy is unmistakable, whether he has made any mistakes. Thinking about this, he remembers Blok’s last poems, their poetic helplessness.
The poet was dying. Periodically, life entered and left him. For a long time he could not see the image in front of him until he realized that it was his own fingers. He suddenly remembered his childhood, a random Chinese passer-by who declared him the owner of a true sign, a lucky man. But now he doesn’t care, the main thing is that he hasn’t died yet. Talking about death, the dying poet remembers Yesenin and Mayakovsky. His strength was leaving him, even the feeling of hunger could not make his body move. He gave the soup to a neighbor, and for the last day his food was only a mug of boiling water, and yesterday’s bread was stolen. He lay there mindlessly until the morning. In the morning, having received his daily bread ration, he dug into it with all his might, feeling neither the scurvy pain nor the bleeding gums. One of his neighbors warned him to save some of the bread for later. "- When later? - he said distinctly and clearly.” Here, with particular depth, with obvious naturalism, the writer describes to us the poet with bread. The image of bread and red wine (Sherry Brandy resembles red wine in appearance) is not accidental in the story. They refer us to biblical stories. When Jesus broke the blessed bread (his body), shared it with others, took the cup of wine (his blood shed for many), and everyone drank from it. All this resonates very symbolically in this story by Shalamov. It is no coincidence that Jesus uttered his words just after he learned about the betrayal; they conceal a certain predestination of imminent death. The boundaries between worlds are erased, and bloody bread here is like a bloody word. It is also noteworthy that the death of a real hero is always public, it always gathers people around, and here a sudden question to the poet from neighbors in misfortune also implies that the poet is a real hero. He is like Christ, dying to gain immortality. Already in the evening, the soul left the pale body of the poet, but the resourceful neighbors kept him for two more days in order to receive bread for him. At the end of the story it is said that the poet thus died earlier than his official date of death, warning that this is an important detail for future biographers. In fact, the author himself is the biographer of his hero. The story “Sherry-Brandy” vividly embodies Shalamov’s theory, which boils down to the fact that a real artist emerges from hell to the surface of life. This is the theme of creative immortality, and the artistic vision here comes down to a double existence: beyond life and within it.
The camp theme in Shalamov's works is very different from the camp theme of Dostoevsky. For Dostoevsky, hard labor was a positive experience. Hard labor restored him, but his hard labor compared to Shalamov’s is a sanatorium. Even when Dostoevsky published the first chapters of Notes from the House of the Dead, censorship forbade him to do so, since a person feels very free there, too easily. And Shalamov writes that the camp is a completely negative experience for a person; not a single person became better after the camp. Shalamov has an absolutely unconventional humanism. Shalamov talks about things that no one has said before him. For example, the concept of friendship. In the story “Dry Rations,” he says that friendship is impossible in the camp: “Friendship is not born either in need or in trouble. Those “difficult” conditions of life that, as fairy tales of fiction tell us, are a prerequisite for the emergence of friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If misfortune and need brought people together and gave birth to friendship, it means that this need is not extreme and the misfortune is not great. Grief is not acute and deep enough if you can share it with friends. In real need, only one’s own mental and physical strength is learned, the limits of one’s capabilities, physical endurance and moral strength are determined.” And he returns to this topic again in another story, “Single Measurement”: “Dugaev was surprised - he and Baranov were not friends. However, with hunger, cold and insomnia, no friendship can be formed, and Dugaev, despite his youth, understood the falsity of the saying about friendship being tested by misfortune and misfortune.” In fact, all those concepts of morality that are possible in everyday life are distorted in the conditions of camp life.
In the story “The Snake Charmer,” the intellectual film scriptwriter Platonov “squeezes novels” to the thieves Fedenka, while reassuring himself that this is better, more noble, than enduring a bucket. Still, here he will awaken interest in the artistic word. He realizes that he still has a good place (at the stew, he can smoke, etc.). At the same time, at dawn, when Platonov, already completely weakened, finished telling the first part of the novel, the criminal Fedenka told him: “Lie here with us. You won't have to sleep much - it's dawn. You'll sleep at work. Gain strength for the evening...” This story shows all the ugliness of relations between prisoners. The thieves here ruled over the rest, they could force anyone to scratch their heels, “squeeze novels”, give up a place on the bunk or take away any thing, otherwise - a noose on the neck. The story “To the Presentation” describes how such thieves stabbed to death one prisoner in order to take away his knitted sweater - the last transfer from his wife before being sent on a long journey, which he did not want to give away. This is the real limit of the fall. At the beginning of the same story, the author conveys “big greetings” to Pushkin - the story begins in Shalamov’s “they were playing cards with the horseman Naumov,” and in Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” the beginning was like this: “Once we were playing cards with the horse guard Narumov.” Shalamov has his own secret game. He keeps in mind the entire experience of Russian literature: Pushkin, Gogol, and Saltykov-Shchedrin. However, he uses it in very measured doses. Here is an unobtrusive and accurate hit right on target. Despite the fact that Shalamov was called the chronicler of those terrible tragedies, he still believed that he was not a chronicler and, moreover, was against teaching life in works. The story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev” shows the motive of freedom and gaining freedom at the expense of one’s life. This is a tradition characteristic of the Russian radical intelligentsia. The connection of times is broken, but Shalamov ties the ends of this thread. But speaking of Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, he blamed such literature for inciting social illusions.
Initially, it may seem to a new reader that Shalamov’s “Kolyma Tales” are similar to Solzhenitsyn’s prose, but this is far from the case. Initially, Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn are incompatible - neither aesthetically, nor ideologically, nor psychologically, nor literary and artistically. These are two completely different, incomparable people. Solzhenitsyn wrote: “True, Shalamov’s stories did not satisfy me artistically: in all of them I lacked characters, faces, the past of these persons and some kind of separate outlook on life for each.” And one of the leading researchers of Shalamov’s work, V. Esipov: “Solzhenitsyn clearly sought to humiliate and trample Shalamov.” On the other hand, Shalamov, having highly praised One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, wrote in one of his letters that he strongly disagreed with Ivan Denisovich in terms of the interpretation of the camp, that Solzhenitsyn did not know and did not understand the camp. He is surprised that Solzhenitsyn has a cat near the kitchen. What kind of camp is this? In real camp life, this cat would have been eaten long ago. Or he was also interested in why Shukhov needed a spoon, since the food was so liquid that it could be drunk simply over the side. Somewhere he also said, well, another varnisher appeared, he was sitting on a sharashka. They have the same topic, but different approaches. Writer Oleg Volkov wrote: “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by Solzhenitsyn not only did not exhaust the theme of “Russia behind barbed wire”, but represents, albeit talented and original, but still a very one-sided and incomplete attempt to illuminate and comprehend one of the most terrible periods in the history of our country " And one more thing: “The illiterate Ivan Shukhov is in a sense a person belonging to the past - now you don’t often meet an adult Soviet person who would perceive reality so primitively, uncritically, whose worldview would be so limited as that of Solzhenitsyn’s hero.” O. Volkov opposes the idealization of labor in the camp, and Shalamov says that camp labor is a curse and corruption of man. Volkov highly appreciated the artistic side of the stories and wrote: “Shalamov’s characters are trying, unlike Solzhenitsynsky, to comprehend the misfortune that has befallen them, and in this analysis and comprehension lies the enormous significance of the stories under review: without such a process it will never be possible to uproot the consequences of the evil that we have inherited from Stalin's rule." Shalamov refused to become a co-author of “The Gulag Archipelago” when Solzhenitsyn offered him co-authorship. At the same time, the very concept of “The Gulag Archipelago” included the publication of this work not in Russia, but outside its borders. Therefore, in the dialogue that took place between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov asked, I want to know for whom I am writing. In their work, Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov, when creating artistic and documentary prose, rely on different life experiences and different creative attitudes. This is one of their most important differences.
Shalamov's prose is structured in such a way as to allow a person to experience what he cannot experience for himself. It tells in simple and understandable language about the camp life of ordinary people during that particularly oppressive period of our history. This is what makes Shalamov’s book not a list of horrors, but genuine literature. In essence, this is philosophical prose about a person, about his behavior in unthinkable, inhuman conditions. Shalamov’s “Kolyma Stories” is at the same time a story, a physiological essay, and a study, but first of all it is a memory, which is valuable for this reason, and which must certainly be conveyed to the future generation.
Bibliography:
1. A. I. Solzhenitsyn and Russian culture. Vol. 3. – Saratov, Publishing Center “Science”, 2009.
2. Varlam Shalamov 1907 – 1982: [electronic resource]. URL: http://shalamov.ru.
3. Volkov, O. Varlam Shalamov “Kolyma Tales” // Banner. - 2015. - No. 2.
4. Esipov, V. Provincial disputes at the end of the twentieth century / V. Esipov. – Vologda: Griffin, 1999. - P. 208.
5. Kolyma stories. – M.: Det. Lit., 2009.
6. Minnullin O.R. Intertextual analysis of Varlam Shalamov's story "Sherry Brandy": Shalamov - Mandelstam - Tyutchev - Verlaine // Philological studios. - Krivoy Rog National University. – 2012. – Issue 8. - pp. 223 - 242.
7. Solzhenitsyn, A. With Varlam Shalamov // New World. - 1999. - No. 4. - P. 164.
8. Shalamov, V. Kolyma stories / V. Shalamov. – Moscow: Det. Lit., 2009.
9. Shalamov collection. Vol. 1. Comp. V.V. Esipov. - Vologda, 1994.
10. Shalamov collection: Vol. 3. Comp. V.V. Esipov. - Vologda: Griffin, 2002.
11. Shklovsky E. The truth of Varlam Shalamov // Shalamov V. Kolyma stories. – M.: Det. Lit., 2009.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE LEGEND ABOUT THE DEATH OF OSIP MANDELSHTAM IN THE STORY BY V.T. SHALAMOVA “SHERRY BRANDY”: ONTOLOGICAL ASPECT
The interest of the humanities in the figure and creative heritage of Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov is continuously, and in recent years especially intense, growing. “The Unnoticed Revolution,” which the writer carried out in Russian prose in the middle of the last century, is today in the center of literary attention of both domestic philologists and Western literature.
Let us turn to the analysis of the intertextual and contextual connections of the story “Sherry Brandy”, in particular the relationships with the main source that formed the basis of the work - the legend of the death of Osip Mandelstam. The analysis will also be aimed at understanding a number of features of the poetics of the “new” (“plutonic”) prose proposed by the writer: the concept of art, which V.T. Shalamov developed both in theory and in practice.
The story “Sherry Brandy” is based on a story about the dying poet Osip Mandelstam, common in the prison environment of the Far East in the 30s. This story is semi-legendary and represents part of Mandelstam’s personal myth.
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam writes in her “Memoirs”: “... rumors about his (O.E. Mandelstam - Author) fate spread widely throughout the camps, and dozens of people told me camp legends about the ill-fated poet. More than once they called me on a date and took me to people who had heard - in their language it sounded: “I probably know” - about O.M... There were also witnesses to the death...
Some people wrote stories about his death. Shalamov's story is simply a thought about how Mandelstam died and how he must have felt. This is the tribute of the injured poet to his brother in art and fate. But among the short stories there are others that claim to be authentic and are decorated with a lot of details. One of them says that he died on a ship leaving for Kolyma. What follows is a detailed account of how he was thrown into the ocean. Legends include the murder of O.M. criminals and reading Petrarch around the fire... This is a typical poetic standard. There are also stories of the “realistic” type with the obligatory participation of punks: at night they knocked on the barracks and demanded a “poet”. R. He was scared of the night guests - what does the punk want from him? It turned out that the guests were calling him to see the dying poet, too. R. found Mandelstam dying."
The popularity and variability of this legend and its relevance in the literature of the mid-century are easily explained. The figure of the poet and his tragic fate develop into a symbol of time, a relief image of cultural consciousness, a personal myth becomes a continuation of national historical existence (also mythologized in its own way).
The process of turning fate into legend, the source of literary plots, is contradictory in nature: poetry and life, often opposing each other, here are directed towards one point. It is not easy to figure out what acts as the determining source of such a myth, because its creation occurs to a greater extent not on life-biographical, but on poetic territory. The primary source of this phenomenon, ideal in nature, is not so much life as mythopoetic consciousness.
The point is not only in the functioning of the image and related plots in culture: the perception of an already established plot by recipients who gravitate towards its continuation, co-creation, further enrichment of the plot, and subsequent mythologization of the individual. The point is also that the hero of the future legend himself is an active creator of this myth: both through his life and through his artistic creativity (let us point out the phenomenon of life creativity, so characteristic of the Silver Age).
Finally, the question arises about the degree of freedom or non-freedom of such a mythological hero-creator from his legend. Its beginning may lie outside his own biography. The biography itself (the life told) and creativity can be included in an already existing mythological context. Thus understood, biography easily becomes a continuation of an already existing mythopoetic plot, grows out of the myth-creating impulse present in the artistic and poetic consciousness of a certain era (or even an entire culture).
Moreover, the above is justified in relation to plots associated with Osip Mandelstam, who keenly felt this side of poetic creativity, experienced the phenomenon of the creation of such a myth as a fact of personal biography and his own understanding of poetic creativity. Let us recall the ending of one of the poet’s most famous poems, “I Have Not Heard the Stories of Ossian” (1914):
And again the skald will compose someone else's song
And how he will pronounce his own.
N.Ya. Mandelstam mentions that her husband’s camp poems were very popular among the prisoners. They were passed down from memory, scratched on the walls, “some of them were undoubtedly dictated by Mandelstam himself, because they were not included in any lists.” A poet embodies his creative existence in poems. Their existence in the team contributed to the rapprochement of poetic and biographical contexts, poetry and life. Poems merge with the image of a person, and the person even then begins to take on the outline of a “wandering” plot. Poetry is seen as a continuation of life, and life is transformed into the form of existence of a poetic myth. What was poetry, inspiration in verse turns out to be the spiritual component of a biographical myth.
In the logic of life creativity, the construction of such a mythopoetic biography, the death of the poet turns out to be a special structurally important moment. “The death of an artist is not an accident, but the last creative act, as if illuminating his life’s path with a sheaf of rays... Why are they surprised that poets predict their fate with such insight and know what kind of death awaits them? After all, the end and death are the strongest structural element, and it subjugates the entire course of life. There is no determinism here; rather, it should be considered as a free expression of will. O.M. imperiously led his life to the death that lay in wait for him...
In the winter of 32-33, at an evening of poetry by O.M., at the editorial office of Litgazeta, Markin suddenly understood everything and said: “You are leading yourself by the hand and leading you to execution.” This is a paraphrase of O.M.’s lines. in a version of one poem: “I led myself by the hand through the streets.” O.M. constantly spoke in poetry about this type of death...”
“Sheaf of rays”, which N.Ya speaks of. Mandelstam is an image that refers to Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Perhaps this is the point of madness...” (1937), which the poet himself called “his architecture” in one of the drafts:
Maybe this is the point of madness,
Maybe it's your conscience -
The knot of life in which we are recognized
And unleashed for being.
So cathedrals of supervital crystals
Conscientious spider light,
Unraveling the ribs, them again
Collects into a single bundle.
Bunches of pure lines are grateful,
Guided by a quiet beam,
They'll get together, they'll get together someday,
Like guests with open brows, -
Only here on earth, and not in heaven...
According to modern researcher Daria Makagonenko: “The poetic formula - “Cathedrals of supervital crystals” - is nothing more than Koltsovo micelles, or, using modern terminology, DNA. That is, a ray of light, which, according to Flammarion, eternally stores information and will transfer and recreate life in another world."
The poet collected his “rays” - the creative energy of his poetry into a single ray, the last creative act, which in the mythological perspective turns out to be his own death. But in this death the discovery of the possibility of a kind of immortality occurs - the image of the dying poet becomes a “wandering” plot. The source of creative energy that feeds him is the poetic myth of Osip Mandelstam, “leading himself by the hand,” forever creating his death in legend. Here the poetic event and true existence are combined.
The second arrest of Varlam Shalamov occurred in 1937, it came during the same wave of arrests that Osip Mandelstam fell under. It is obvious that either during the transit or in the camp, the writer perceived this common story about the death of the poet, perceived the poetic potential of the created image-myth (perhaps the primary source of information about Osip Mandelstam for V.T. Shalamov were the doctors of the transit camp near Vladivostok).
“Sherry Brandy” in no way pretends to be documentary, and by definition N.Ya. Mandelstam "a tribute from the victim artist to his brother in art and fate." On the other hand, the remark of literary critic Pavel Nerler is also true: “Simple guild solidarity - prisoners’ and writers’ - is not enough here; there is a different depth of penetration, perhaps, into one of the images dearest to the heart.” And the same N.Ya. Mandelstam in a letter to V.T. Shalamovu notes: “This is precision, a million times more accurate than any mathematical formula. This precision creates a music of frantic depth of concepts and meanings that sounds in praise of life. Your work deepens and goes from the surface of life to its very depths.”
Naturally, one cannot talk about a literal coincidence of the image of the dying poet in the story “Sherry Brandy” and the image of the legend. The hero of the legend cannot be identified with the real Osip Mandelstam, nor should the biographical Mandelstam be equated with the lyrical double postulated in his poetry. The hero created by the writer is the fruit of his creative imagination, his authorial activity, and the legend belongs to the collective poetic consciousness. The biographical person and the hero of the camp legend are also obviously different. The difference between the lyrical subject and the biographical “I” is a scientifically understood fact.
However, despite the tangible differences between these entities, there is a deep connection. The basis for this connection is poetic consciousness, connecting such different quantities into one complex but inseparable whole. The hero of legends, the image of a poet and a person, as well as the lyrical subject recreated in the poetry of Osip Mandelstam are included in the creative consciousness of V.T. Shalamov, so to speak, on an equal footing, are “melted” into a single image with the determining aesthetic activity of the author of the story “Sherry Brandy”. The poetic image of the poet in the story by V.T. Shalamov is a certain form of existence after the death of Osip Mandelstam, a continuation of his myth and the creative impulse that was his creativity and life creation.
It is noteworthy that V.T. Shalamov positioned his writing work as “overcoming everything that can be called “literature” (see on this topic in E.A. Shklovsky, paragraph “Transformed Document”). The desire to rethink and, perhaps, rebuild the border between genuine life and art is one of the main lines of this writer’s work (cf. “Sherry Brandy”: “life was the inspiration”). A clear distinction between the sources of the image of the dying poet in the story by V.T. Shalamov becomes impossible, the boundaries of life and art turn out to be unsteady.
The forms of existence and creative embodiment of Osip Mandelstam are transformed by Shalamov into a new poetic form, which is related to the original, but is not reducible to it.
The plot of V. Shalamov’s stories is a painful description of the prison and camp life of prisoners of the Soviet Gulag, their similar tragic destinies, in which chance, merciless or merciful, an assistant or a murderer, the tyranny of bosses and thieves rule. Hunger and its convulsive saturation, exhaustion, painful dying, slow and almost equally painful recovery, moral humiliation and moral degradation - this is what is constantly in the focus of the writer’s attention.
Funeral word
The author remembers his camp comrades by name. Evoking the mournful martyrology, he tells who died and how, who suffered and how, who hoped for what, who and how behaved in this Auschwitz without ovens, as Shalamov called the Kolyma camps. Few managed to survive, few managed to survive and remain morally unbroken.
Life of engineer Kipreev
Having not betrayed or sold out to anyone, the author says that he has developed for himself a formula for actively defending his existence: a person can only consider himself human and survive if at any moment he is ready to commit suicide, ready to die. However, later he realizes that he only built himself a comfortable shelter, because it is unknown what you will be like at the decisive moment, whether you simply have enough physical strength, and not just mental strength. Engineer-physicist Kipreev, arrested in 1938, not only withstood a beating during interrogation, but even rushed at the investigator, after which he was put in a punishment cell. However, they still force him to sign false testimony, threatening him with the arrest of his wife. Nevertheless, Kipreev continued to prove to himself and others that he was a man and not a slave, like all prisoners. Thanks to his talent (he invented a way to restore burnt-out light bulbs, repaired an X-ray machine), he manages to avoid the most difficult work, but not always. He miraculously survives, but the moral shock remains in him forever.
To the show
Camp molestation, Shalamov testifies, affected everyone to a greater or lesser extent and occurred in a variety of forms. Two thieves are playing cards. One of them is lost to the nines and asks you to play for “representation”, that is, in debt. At some point, excited by the game, he unexpectedly orders an ordinary intellectual prisoner, who happened to be among the spectators of their game, to give him a woolen sweater. He refuses, and then one of the thieves “finishes” him, but the sweater still goes to the thieves.
At night
Two prisoners sneak to the grave where the body of their deceased comrade was buried in the morning, and remove the dead man’s underwear to sell or exchange for bread or tobacco the next day. The initial disgust at taking off their clothes gives way to the pleasant thought that tomorrow they might be able to eat a little more and even smoke.
Single metering
Camp labor, which Shalamov clearly defines as slave labor, is for the writer a form of the same corruption. The poor prisoner is not able to give the percentage, so labor becomes torture and slow death. Zek Dugaev is gradually weakening, unable to withstand a sixteen-hour working day. He drives, picks, pours, carries again and picks again, and in the evening the caretaker appears and measures what Dugaev has done with a tape measure. The mentioned figure - 25 percent - seems very high to Dugaev, his calves ache, his arms, shoulders, head hurt unbearably, he even lost the feeling of hunger. A little later, he is called to the investigator, who asks the usual questions: name, surname, article, term. And a day later, the soldiers take Dugaev to a remote place, fenced with a high fence with barbed wire, from where the whirring of tractors can be heard at night. Dugaev realizes why he was brought here and that his life is over. And he only regrets that he suffered the last day in vain.
Rain
Sherry Brandy
A prisoner-poet, who was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, dies. It lies in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. He takes a long time to die. Sometimes some thought comes - for example, that the bread that he put under his head was stolen from him, and it is so scary that he is ready to swear, fight, search... But he no longer has the strength for this, and the thought of bread also weakens. When the daily ration is placed in his hand, he presses the bread to his mouth with all his might, sucks it, tries to tear it and gnaw it with his scurvy, loose teeth. When he dies, he is not written off for another two days, and inventive neighbors manage to distribute bread for the dead man as if for a living one: they make him raise his hand like a puppet doll.
Shock therapy
Prisoner Merzlyakov, a man of large build, finds himself in general labor and feels that he is gradually giving up. One day he falls, cannot get up immediately and refuses to drag the log. He is beaten first by his own people, then by his guards, and they bring him to the camp - he has a broken rib and pain in the lower back. And although the pain quickly passed and the rib has healed, Merzlyakov continues to complain and pretends that he cannot straighten up, trying to delay his discharge to work at any cost. He is sent to the central hospital, to the surgical department, and from there to the nervous department for examination. He has a chance to be activated, that is, released due to illness. Remembering the mine, the pinching cold, the empty bowl of soup that he drank without even using a spoon, he concentrates all his will so as not to be caught in deception and sent to a penal mine. However, the doctor Pyotr Ivanovich, himself a former prisoner, was not a mistake. The professional replaces the human in him. He spends most of his time exposing malingerers. This pleases his pride: he is an excellent specialist and is proud that he has retained his qualifications, despite a year of general work. He immediately understands that Merzlyakov is a malingerer, and anticipates the theatrical effect of the new revelation. First, the doctor gives him Rausch anesthesia, during which Merzlyakov’s body can be straightened, and a week later he undergoes the so-called shock therapy procedure, the effect of which is similar to an attack of violent madness or an epileptic seizure. After this, the prisoner himself asks to be released.
Typhoid quarantine
Prisoner Andreev, having fallen ill with typhus, is quarantined. Compared to general work in the mines, the position of the patient gives a chance to survive, which the hero almost no longer hoped for. And then he decides, by hook or by crook, to stay here as long as possible, in the transit train, and then, perhaps, he will no longer be sent to the gold mines, where there is hunger, beatings and death. At the roll call before the next sending to work of those who are considered recovered, Andreev does not respond, and thus he manages to hide for quite a long time. The transit is gradually emptying, and Andreev’s turn finally reaches. But now it seems to him that he has won his battle for life, that now the taiga is saturated and if there are any dispatches, it will be only for short-term, local business trips. However, when a truck with a selected group of prisoners, who were unexpectedly given winter uniforms, passes the line separating short-term missions from distant ones, he realizes with an internal shudder that fate has cruelly laughed at him.
Aortic aneurysm
Illness (and the emaciated state of the “gone” prisoners is quite equivalent to a serious illness, although it was not officially considered such) and the hospital are an indispensable attribute of the plot in Shalamov’s stories. Prisoner Ekaterina Glovatskaya is admitted to the hospital. A beauty, she immediately attracted the attention of the doctor on duty Zaitsev, and although he knows that she is on close terms with his acquaintance, prisoner Podshivalov, the head of an amateur art group (“serf theater,” as the head of the hospital jokes), nothing prevents him in turn try your luck. He begins, as usual, with a medical examination of Glowacka, with listening to the heart, but his male interest quickly gives way to purely medical concern. He finds that Glowacka has an aortic aneurysm, a disease in which any careless movement can cause death. The authorities, who have made it an unwritten rule to separate lovers, have already once sent Glovatskaya to a penal women's mine. And now, after the doctor’s report about the prisoner’s dangerous illness, the head of the hospital is sure that this is nothing more than the machinations of the same Podshivalov, trying to detain his mistress. Glovatskaya is discharged, but as soon as she is loaded into the car, what Dr. Zaitsev warned about happens - she dies.
The last battle of Major Pugachev
Among the heroes of Shalamov’s prose there are those who not only strive to survive at any cost, but are also able to intervene in the course of circumstances, stand up for themselves, even risking their lives. According to the author, after the war of 1941–1945. Prisoners who fought and were captured by Germans began to arrive in the northeastern camps. These are people of a different temperament, “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons. Commanders and soldiers, pilots and intelligence officers..." But most importantly, they had an instinct for freedom, which the war awakened in them. They shed their blood, sacrificed their lives, saw death face to face. They were not corrupted by camp slavery and were not yet exhausted to the point of losing strength and will. Their “fault” was that they were surrounded or captured. And Major Pugachev, one of these not yet broken people, is clear: “they were brought to their death - to replace these living dead” whom they met in Soviet camps. Then the former major gathers equally determined and strong prisoners to match himself, ready to either die or become free. Their group included pilots, a reconnaissance officer, a paramedic, and a tankman. They realized that they were innocently doomed to death and that they had nothing to lose. They've been preparing their escape all winter. Pugachev realized that only those who avoid general work could survive the winter and then escape. And the participants in the conspiracy, one after another, are promoted to servants: someone becomes a cook, someone a cult leader, someone who repairs weapons in the security detachment. But then spring comes, and with it the planned day.
At five o'clock in the morning there was a knock on the watch. The duty officer lets in the camp cook-prisoner, who has come, as usual, to get the keys to the pantry. A minute later, the guard on duty finds himself strangled, and one of the prisoners changes into his uniform. The same thing happens to the other duty officer who returned a little later. Then everything goes according to Pugachev’s plan. The conspirators break into the premises of the security detachment and, having shot the duty officer, take possession of the weapon. Holding the suddenly awakened soldiers at gunpoint, they change into military uniforms and stock up on provisions. Having left the camp, they stop the truck on the highway, drop off the driver and continue the journey in the car until the gas runs out. After that they go into the taiga. At night - the first night of freedom after long months of captivity - Pugachev, waking up, remembers his escape from a German camp in 1944, crossing the front line, interrogation in a special department, being accused of espionage and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He also remembers the visits of General Vlasov’s emissaries to the German camp, recruiting Russian soldiers, convincing them that for the Soviet regime, all of them who were captured were traitors to the Motherland. Pugachev did not believe them until he could see for himself. He looks lovingly at his sleeping comrades who believed in him and stretched out their hands to freedom; he knows that they are “the best, the most worthy of all.” And a little later a battle breaks out, the last hopeless battle between the fugitives and the soldiers surrounding them. Almost all of the fugitives die, except for one, seriously wounded, who is cured and then shot. Only Major Pugachev manages to escape, but he knows, hiding in the bear’s den, that they will find him anyway. He doesn't regret what he did. His last shot was at himself.
The poet was dying. Large hands, swollen with hunger, with white, bloodless fingers and dirty, long-grown nails lay on the chest, not hiding from the cold. Previously, he put them in his bosom, on his naked body, but now there was too little warmth there. The mittens were stolen long ago; All that was needed for theft was arrogance - they stole in broad daylight. A dim electric sun, fouled by flies and enclosed by a round grating, was attached high under the ceiling. The light fell at the poet's feet - he lay, as if in a box, in the dark depths of the bottom row of solid two-story bunks. From time to time the fingers moved. they clicked like castanets and felt a button, a loop, a hole in a peacoat, brushed away some rubbish and stopped again. The poet had been dying for so long that he no longer understood that he was dying. Sometimes, painfully and almost palpably pushing through his brain, some simple and strong thought would come - that the bread he had placed under his head had been stolen. And it was so burningly scary that he was ready to argue, swear, fight, search, prove. But he didn’t have the strength for all this, and the thought of bread was weakening... And now he was thinking about something else, about how everyone had to be taken overseas, and for some reason the ship was late, and it was good that it was here. And just as easily and unsteadily, he began to think about the large birthmark on the face of the barracks orderly. For most of the day he thought about the events that filled his life here. The visions that appeared before his eyes were not visions of childhood, youth, success. All his life he was in a hurry to get somewhere. It was wonderful that there was no need to rush, that you could think slowly. And he slowly thought about the great monotony of dying movements, about what doctors understood and described earlier than artists and poets. The Hippocratic face - a human death mask - is known to every medical student. This mysterious monotony of dying movements gave Freud the basis for the most daring hypotheses. Monotony and repetition are the essential soil of science. What is unique in death was sought not by doctors, but by poets. It was nice to know that he could still think. Hunger nausea has long become commonplace. And everything was equal - Hippocrates, the orderly with a birthmark and his own dirty nail.
Life came in and out of him, and he died. But life appeared again, eyes opened, thoughts appeared. Only the desires did not appear. He had long lived in a world where it was often necessary to bring people back to life - with artificial respiration, glucose, camphor, caffeine. The dead became alive again. And why not? He believed in immortality, real human immortality. I often thought that there simply were no biological reasons why a person should not live forever... Old age is only a curable disease, and if it were not for this tragic misunderstanding that has not been solved until now, he could live forever. Or until you get tired. But he was not at all tired of living. Even now, in this transit barracks, “transit”, as the local residents lovingly called it. She was the threshold of horror, but she was not horror herself. On the contrary, the spirit of freedom lived here, and this was felt by everyone. There was a camp ahead, a prison behind. It was “the world on the road,” and the poet understood this.
There was another path to immortality - Tyutchev's:
Blessed is he who has visited this world
His moments are fatal.
But if, apparently, he does not have to be immortal in human form, as a certain physical unit, then he has earned creative immortality. He was called the first Russian poet of the twentieth century, and he often thought that this was true. He believed in the immortality of his poems. He had no students, but do poets tolerate them? He also wrote prose - bad, he wrote articles. But only in poetry did he find something new for poetry, important, as it always seemed to him. His entire past life was literature, a book, a fairy tale, a dream, and only the present day was true life.
All this was thought not in an argument, but secretly, somewhere deep inside. These thoughts lacked passion. Indifference had long possessed him. What trifles all this was, “mouse running” compared to the unkind heaviness of life. He wondered to himself - how could he think so about poetry when everything had already been decided, and he knew it very well, better than anyone? Who needs him here and who is he equal to? Why did all this need to be understood, and he waited... and understood.
In those moments when life returned to his body and his half-open, dull eyes suddenly began to see, his eyelids to tremble and his fingers to move, thoughts returned that he had not thought were his last.
Life entered on its own as an autocratic mistress: he did not call her, and yet she entered his body, into his brain, entered like poetry, like inspiration. And the meaning of this word was revealed to him in its entirety for the first time. Poems were the life-giving force by which he lived. Exactly. He did not live for poetry, he lived for poetry.
Now it was so clearly, so palpably clear that inspiration was life; before his death he was given the opportunity to learn that life was inspiration, precisely inspiration.
And he rejoiced that he was given the opportunity to learn this last truth.
Everything, the whole world was compared to poetry: work, the tramp of a horse, a house, a bird, a rock, love - all life easily entered into poetry and was placed comfortably there. And this was how it had to be, for poetry was the word.
The stanzas still flowed easily, one after another, and, although he had not written down and could not write down his poems for a long time, the words still flowed easily in some given and each time extraordinary rhythm. Rhyme was a seeker, a tool for magnetic search for words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed by with the speed of some electronic machine. Everything screamed: take me. I am not here. There was no need to look for anything. I just had to throw it away. There were, as it were, two people - the one who composes, who launched his turntable with all his might, and the other, who selects and from time to time stops the running machine. And, seeing that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real poetry. What's wrong with the fact that they are not written down? Recording, printing - all this is vanity of vanities. Everything that is born unselfishly is not the best. The best thing is what is not written down, what was composed and disappeared, melted away without a trace, and only the creative joy that he feels and which cannot be confused with anything, proves that the poem was created, that the beautiful was created. Is he wrong? Is his creative joy unmistakable?
He remembered how bad, how poetically helpless Blok’s last poems were, and how Blok seemed not to understand this...
The poet forced himself to stop. It was easier to do it here than somewhere in Leningrad or Moscow.
Then he realized that he had not thought about anything for a long time. Life was leaving him again.
He lay motionless for many hours and suddenly saw not far from him something like a shooting target or a geological map. The map was silent, and he tried in vain to understand what was depicted. It took a long time before he realized that these were his own fingers. On the tips of the fingers there were still brown traces of finished smoking, sucked tobacco cigarettes - a fingerprint pattern clearly stood out on the pads, like a drawing of a mountain relief. The pattern was the same on all ten fingers - concentric circles, similar to a cut of wood. He remembered how once as a child he was stopped on the boulevard by a Chinese man from the laundry, which was in the basement of the house where he grew up. The Chinese accidentally took him by the hand, then the other, turned his palms up and excitedly shouted something in his own language. It turned out that he declared the boy lucky, the owner of the right sign. The poet recalled this mark of happiness many times, especially often when he published his first book. Now he remembered the Chinese without malice and without irony - he didn’t care.
The most important thing is that he is not dead yet. By the way, what does it mean: died as a poet? There must be something childishly naive in this death. Or something deliberate, theatrical, like Yesenin, Mayakovsky.
He died as an actor - that's understandable. But did he die as a poet?
Yes, he guessed some of what lay ahead. During the transfer he managed to understand and guess a lot. And he rejoiced, quietly rejoiced at his powerlessness and hoped that he would die. He remembered a long-standing prison dispute: what is worse, what is more terrible - a camp or a prison? Nobody really knew anything, the arguments were speculative, and how cruelly the man who was brought from the camp to that prison smiled. He remembered this man's smile forever, so much so that he was afraid to remember it.
Think how cleverly he will deceive them, those who brought him here, if he dies now - for ten whole years. He had been in exile several years ago and knew that he was on the special lists forever. Forever?! The scale has shifted and the words have changed meaning.
Again he felt the beginning of a surge of strength, precisely a surge, like in the sea. High tide for hours. And then - low tide. But the sea does not leave us forever. He will still recover.
He suddenly wanted to eat, but had no strength to move. He slowly and difficultly remembered that he had given today's soup to his neighbor, that a mug of boiling water had been his only food for the last day. Besides bread, of course. But bread was given out for a very, very long time. And yesterday's was stolen. Someone else had the strength to steal.
So he lay lightly and thoughtlessly until morning came. The electric light turned a little yellower, and bread was brought on large plywood trays, as they were brought every day.
But he no longer worried, didn’t look out for the crust, didn’t cry if it wasn’t him who got the crust, didn’t stuff an appendage into his mouth with trembling fingers, and the appendage instantly melted in his mouth, his nostrils flared, and with his whole being he felt the taste and smell of fresh rye bread . And the makeweight was no longer in his mouth, although he did not have time to take a sip or move his jaw. The piece of bread melted and disappeared, and it was a miracle - one of many local miracles. No, he wasn't worried now. But when his daily ration was placed in his hands, he wrapped his bloodless fingers around it and pressed the bread to his mouth. He bit the bread with scurvy teeth, his gums bled, his teeth were loose, but he felt no pain. With all his might he pressed the bread to his mouth, stuffed it into his mouth, sucked it, tore it and gnawed it...