Umberto eco is the short name of the rose. Book Name of the Rose read online

Umberto Eco

From the translator

Before Umberto Eco published his first work of fiction, the novel The Name of the Rose, in 1980, on the threshold of his fiftieth birthday, he was known in academic circles in Italy and the entire scientific world as an authoritative specialist in the philosophy of the Middle Ages and in the field of semiotics - the science of signs He developed, in particular, the problems of the relationship between the text and the audience, both on the material of avant-garde literature and on heterogeneous material of mass culture. Undoubtedly, Umberto Eco wrote the novel, helping himself with scientific observations, equipping his “postmodernist” intellectual prose with the springs of fascination.

The “launch” (as they say in Italy) of the book was skillfully prepared by advertising in the press. The public was also clearly attracted by the fact that Eco had been running a column in the Espresso magazine for many years, which introduced the average subscriber to current humanitarian problems. And yet, real success exceeds all the expectations of publishers and literary critics.

Exotic flavor plus exciting criminal intrigue ensures interest in the novel to a mass audience. And a significant ideological charge, combined with irony and playing with literary associations, attracts intellectuals. In addition, it is well known how popular the genre of the historical novel itself is, both here and in the West. Eco also took this factor into account. His book is a complete and accurate guide to the Middle Ages. Anthony Burgess writes in his review: “People read Arthur Haley to find out about airport life. If you read this book, you will not be left in any doubt about how the monastery functioned in the 14th century.”

For nine years, according to the results of national polls, the book has been in first place in the “hot twenty of the week” (the Italians respectfully place the Divine Comedy in last place in the same twenty). It is noted that, thanks to the wide dissemination of Eco’s book, the number of students enrolling in the department of medieval history is greatly increasing. The novel did not go unnoticed by readers in Turkey, Japan, and Eastern Europe; captured the North American book market for a fairly long period, which is very rarely achieved by a European writer.

One of the secrets of such stunning success is revealed to us in the theoretical work of Eco himself, where he discusses the need for “entertainment” in literature. The literary avant-garde of the 20th century was, as a rule, alienated from the stereotypes of mass consciousness. In the 70s, in Western literature, however, a feeling matured that breaking stereotypes and language experimentation in themselves did not provide the “joy of the text” in its entirety. It began to be felt that an essential element of literature was the pleasure of storytelling.

“I wanted the reader to be entertained. At least as much as I had fun. The modern novel has tried to abandon plot-based entertainment in favor of other types of entertainment. I, a pious believer in Aristotelian poetics, have believed all my life that a novel should entertain with its plot. Or even primarily by the plot,” writes Eco in his essay on “The Name of the Rose,” included in this edition.

But The Name of the Rose is not only entertainment. Eco also remains faithful to another principle of Aristotle: a literary work must contain a serious intellectual meaning.

The Brazilian priest, one of the main representatives of “liberation theology” Leonardo Boff writes about Eco’s novel: “This is not only a Gothic story from the life of an Italian Benedictine monastery of the 14th century. Undoubtedly, the author uses all the cultural realities of the era (with an abundance of detail and erudition), maintaining the greatest historical accuracy. But all this is for the sake of issues that remain highly significant today, as they were yesterday. There is a struggle between two life projects, personal and social: one project stubbornly strives to preserve what exists, to preserve it by all means, even to the point of destroying other people and self-destruction; the second project strives for the permanent discovery of something new, even at the cost of its own destruction.”

Critic Cesare Zaccaria believes that the writer’s appeal to the detective genre is caused, among other things, by the fact that “this genre was better than others in expressing the inexorable charge of violence and fear inherent in the world in which we live.” Yes, undoubtedly, many particular situations of the novel and its main conflict can be fully “read” as an allegorical reflection of the situations of the current, 20th century. Thus, many reviewers, and the author himself in one of his interviews, draw parallels between the plot of the novel and the murder of Aldo Moro. Comparing the novel “The Name of the Rose” with the book of the famous writer Leonardo Sciasci “The Moro Affair”, critic Leonardo Lattarulo writes: “They are based on an ethical question par excellence, revealing the insurmountable problematicity of ethics. We are talking about the problem of evil. This return to the detective story, carried out seemingly in the pure interests of literary play, is in fact frighteningly serious, for it is entirely inspired by the hopeless and hopeless seriousness of ethics.”

Now the reader gets the opportunity to get acquainted with the sensational new product of 1980 in its entirety.

Of course, the manuscript

On August 16, 1968, I purchased a book entitled “Notes of Father Adson from Melk, translated into French from the edition of Father J. Mabillon” (Paris, LaSource Abbey Printing House, 1842). The author of the translation was a certain Abbot Balle. In a rather poor historical commentary, it was reported that the translator followed word for word the edition of a 14th-century manuscript found in the library of the Melk monastery by the famous seventeenth-century scholar who contributed so much to the historiography of the Benedictine Order. Thus, a rarity found in Prague (for the third time, it turns out) saved me from melancholy in a foreign country, where I was waiting for the one who was dear to me. A few days later the poor city was occupied by Soviet troops. I managed to cross the Austrian border in Linz; From there I easily reached Vienna, where I finally met the woman, and together we set off on a journey up the Danube.

In a state of nervous excitement, I reveled in Adson’s terrifying story and was so captivated that I didn’t notice how I began to translate, filling out the wonderful large notebooks of the Joseph Gibert company, in which it is so pleasant to write, if, of course, the pen is soft enough. Meanwhile, we found ourselves in the vicinity of Melk, where the Stift, which had been rebuilt many times, still stands on a cliff above a bend in the river. As the reader has probably already understood, no traces of Father Adson’s manuscript were found in the monastery library.

Shortly before Salzburg, one damned night in a small hotel on the banks of Mondsee, our union was destroyed, the journey was interrupted, and my companion disappeared; Balle’s book also disappeared with her, which certainly had no malicious intent, but was only a manifestation of the crazy unpredictability of our breakup. All I was left with then was a stack of written notebooks and absolute emptiness in my soul.

A few months later, in Paris, I returned to the search. In my extracts from the French original, among other things, there is also a link to the original source, surprisingly accurate and detailed:

Vetera analecta, sive collectio veterum aliquot operum & opusculorum omnis generis, carminum, epistolarum, diplomaton, epitaphiorum, &, cum itinere germanico, adnotationibus aliquot disquisitionibus R. P. D. Joannis Mabillon, Presbiteri ac Monachi Ord. Sancti Benedicti e Congregatione S. Mauri. – Nova Editio cui accessere Mabilonii vita & aliquot opuscula, scilicet Dissertatio de Pane Eucharistico, Azimo et Fermentatio, ad Eminentiss. Cardinalem Bona. Subjungitur opusculum Eldefonsi Hispaniensis Episcopi de eodem argumento Et Eusebii Romani ad Theophilum Gallum epistola, De cultu sanctorum ignotorum, Parisiis, apud Levesque, ad Pontem S. Michaelis, MDCCXXI, cum privilegio Regis.

I immediately ordered Vetera Analecta from the library of Sainte-Geneviève, but, to my great surprise, at least two discrepancies with Balle’s description appeared on the title page. Firstly, the publisher’s name looked different: here – Montalant, ad Ripam P. P. Augustianorum (prope Pontem S. Michaelis). Secondly, the publication date here was put two years later. Needless to say, the collection contained neither the notes of Adson of Melk, nor any publications where the name Adson appeared. In general, this publication, as is easy to see, consists of materials of medium or very small volume, while Balle’s text occupies several hundred pages. I turned to the most famous medievalists, in particular to Etienne Gilson, a wonderful, unforgettable scientist. But they all maintained that the only existing edition of Vetera Analecta was the one I used at Sainte-Geneviève. Having visited LaSource Abbey, located in the Passy region, and talking with my friend Father Arne Laanestedt, I was absolutely sure that no Abbot Balle had ever published books in the printing house of LaSource Abbey; it seems that there was never a printing house at Lasource Abbey. The inaccuracy of French scientists with regard to bibliographic footnotes is well known. But this case exceeded the worst expectations. It became clear that what I had in my hands was a pure fake. In addition, Balle's book was now out of reach (in general, I did not see a way to get it back). I had only my own notes, which inspired rather little confidence.

Introduction

The name Umberto Eco is one of the most popular in modern culture
Western Europe. Semiotician, esthetician, historian of medieval literature, critic and essayist, professor at the University of Bologna and honorary doctor of many universities in Europe and America, author of dozens of books, the number of which he increases every year at a speed that boggles the imagination,
Umberto Eco is one of the most seething craters of the volcano of modern intellectual life in Italy. The fact that in 1980 he abruptly changed course and, instead of the usual appearance of an academic scientist, polymath and critic, appeared before the public as the author of a sensational novel, which immediately gained international fame, was crowned with literary awards and served as the basis for a sensational film adaptation, seemed unexpected to a number of critics.

Umberto Eco is an Italian writer, author of the world famous novels “Name
Roses" (1980), "Foucault's Pendulum" (1988), "The Island on the Eve" (1995). Winner of the Strega and Anghiari prizes and the Italian National Prize (1981). Honorary Citizen of Monte Carlo (1981). Chevalier of the French Order of Merit in Literature (1985), Order of Marshall MacLahan (UNESCO) (1985), Order
Legion of Honor (1993), Greek Order of the Golden Star (1995), Order
Grand Cross of the Italian Republic (1996).

The success of the work was also facilitated by a successful film adaptation. The writer was awarded the prestigious Italian Strega Prize (1981) and the French
"Medici" (1982).

It turned out that the life of the inhabitants of a Benedictine monastery of the 14th century could be interesting to people of the 20th century. And not only because the author spun detective and love intrigues. But also because the effect of personal presence was created.

This novel became the most striking proof of the correctness of French historians
“Annals” schools, which invited to study history through details, in particular, everyday life. Through sociology and psychology, and not politics, as it was before. But the point is not even this, but the degree of authenticity that allows, with this approach, to feel the distant era of one’s own, and the Other’s.
To our neighbors.

Unfortunately, the work of Umberto Eco, and especially his novel “The Name of the Rose,” has not been sufficiently studied in Russia. With the exception of the article by Lotman Yu., Kostyukovich
E. we were unable to find works devoted to the study of the works of a modern Italian writer.

Therefore, in this work we will try to give an analysis of the novel by Umberto Eco
"The Name of the Rose" from a historical point of view.

1. Composition and plot of Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose”

In his novel “The Name of the Rose,” Umberto Eco paints a picture of the medieval world and describes historical events with extreme accuracy. The author chose an interesting composition for his novel. In the so-called introduction, the author reports that he received an ancient manuscript of a monk named
Adson, who tells about the events that happened to him in the 14th century. “In a state of nervous excitement,” the author “revels in the terrifying tale
Adson" and translates it for the "modern reader". The further account of events is supposedly a translation of an ancient manuscript.

Adson's manuscript itself is divided into seven chapters, according to the number of days, and each day
– for episodes dedicated to worship services. Thus, the action in the novel takes place over seven days.

The narrative begins with a prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God."

Adson’s work refers us to the events of 1327, “when Emperor Louis entered Italy and prepared, according to the providence of the Most High, to shame the vile usurper, Christ-seller and heresiarch, who
Aviglione covered the holy name of the apostle with shame." Adson introduces the reader to the events that preceded it. At the beginning of the century, Pope Clement V moved the apostolic see to Avignon, abandoning Rome to the plunder of local sovereigns.” "IN
In 1314, five German sovereigns in Frankfurt elected Louis of Bavaria as supreme ruler of the empire. However, on the same day on the opposite shore
The Maina Palatine Count of the Rhine and the Archbishop of the city of Cologne elected Frederick of Austria to the same reign." "In 1322 Louis
The Bavarian defeated his rival Frederick. John (the new pope) excommunicated the winner, and he declared the pope a heretic. It was in this year that the chapter of the Franciscan brothers met in Perugia, and their general Michael Tsezensky proclaimed the poverty of Christ as a truth of faith. The Pope was dissatisfied and in 1323 he rebelled against the Franciscan doctrine
Louis, apparently, then saw powerful comrades-in-arms in the Franciscans, who were now hostile to the pope. Louis, having concluded an alliance with the defeated Frederick, entered Italy, accepted the crown in Milan, suppressed the discontent of the Visconti, surrounded Pisa with troops and quickly entered Rome.”

These are the events of that time. It must be said that Umberto Eco, as a true expert on the Middle Ages, is extremely accurate in the events described.

So, the events take place at the beginning of the 14th century. The young monk, Adson, on whose behalf the story is told, assigned to the learned Franciscan
William of Baskerville, arrives at the monastery. William, a former inquisitor, is assigned to investigate the unexpected death of a monk.
Adelma Otransky. Wilhelm and his assistant begin an investigation. They are allowed to talk and walk everywhere except the library. But the investigation comes to a dead end, because all the roots of the crime lead to the library, which is the main value and treasury of the abbey, which houses a huge number of priceless books. Even monks are prohibited from entering the library, and books are not issued to everyone and not all that are available in the library. In addition, the library is a labyrinth; legends about “will-o’-the-wisps” and “monsters” are associated with it.
Wilhelm and Adson visit the library under cover of darkness, from which they barely manage to escape. There they encounter new mysteries.

Wilhelm and Adson reveal the secret life of the abbey (meetings of monks with corrupt women, homosexuality, drug use). Adson himself succumbs to the temptation of a local peasant woman.

At this time, new murders are committed in the abbey (Venantius is found in a barrel of blood, Berengar of Arundel in a bath of water, Severina Sant
Emmeransky in his room with herbs) connected with the same secret that leads to the library, namely to a certain book. Wilhelm and
Adson manages to partially solve the labyrinth of the library and find the hiding place
“The Limit of Africa”, a walled room in which a treasured book is kept.

To solve the murders, Cardinal Bertrand of Podget arrives at the abbey and immediately gets down to business. He detains Salvator, a wretched freak who, wanting to attract the attention of a woman with the help of a black cat, a rooster and two eggs, was detained along with an unfortunate peasant woman. The woman (Adson recognized her as his friend) was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.

During interrogation, cellarer Remigius talks about the torment of Dolchin and Margarita, who were burned at the stake, and how he did not resist this, although he had with him
Margarita connection. In desperation, the cellarer takes over all the killings: Adelma from
Ontanto, Venantia of Salvemec "because he was too learned", Berengar
Arundelsky “out of hatred for the library”, Severin of St. Emmeransky “because he collected herbs.”

But Adson and Wilhelm manage to unravel the mystery of the library. Jorge, a blind old man, the chief keeper of the library, hides the “Limit” from everyone
Africa", which contains the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which is of great interest, around which there is endless controversy in the abbey. For example, it is forbidden to laugh in the abbey. Jorge acts as a kind of judge to everyone who laughs inappropriately or even draws funny pictures. In his opinion, Christ never laughed, and he forbids others to laugh. Everyone treats Jorge with respect. They are afraid of him.
However, Jorge for many years was the real ruler of the abbey, who knew and kept all its secrets from the others, when he began to go blind, he allowed an ignorant monk to the library, and put a monk at the head of the abbey, who was subordinate to him. When the situation got out of control, and many people wanted to unravel the mystery of the “limit of Africa” and take possession of the book
Aristotle, Jorge steals poison from Severin's laboratory and saturates the pages of the treasured book with it. The monks, turning over and wetting their fingers with saliva, gradually die; with the help of Malachi, Jorge kills Severin and locks him up.
Abbot, who also dies.

Wilhelm and his assistant unravel all this. Finally, Jorge gives them to read Aristotle's Poetics, which contains Jorge's refuting ideas about the sinfulness of laughter. According to Aristotle, laughter has educational value; he equates it to art. For Aristotle, laughter is
"good, pure power". Laughter can remove fear; when a man laughs, he has nothing to do with death. “However, the law can only be maintained through fear.” From this idea I could
“a Luciferian spark would fly out”, from this book “a new, crushing desire could be born to destroy death through liberation from fear”
. This is what Jorge is so afraid of. All his life, Jorge did not laugh and forbade others to do so, this gloomy old man, hiding the truth from everyone, established lies.

As a result of Jorge's pursuit, Adson drops the lantern and a fire breaks out in the library, which cannot be extinguished. Three days later the entire abbey burns to the ground. Only a few years later, Adson, traveling through those places, comes to the ashes, finds several precious scraps, and then, with one word or sentence, can restore at least an insignificant list of lost books.

This is the interesting plot of the novel. “The Name of the Rose” is a kind of detective story, the action of which takes place in a medieval monastery.

Critic Cesare Zaccaria believes that the writer’s appeal to the detective genre is due to the fact that “this genre, better than others, was able to express the insatiable charge of violence and fear inherent in the world in which we live.” Yes, undoubtedly, many of the novel’s particular situations and its main conflict are quite
“read” also as an allegorical reflection of the situation of the current, twentieth century.

2. Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose” - historical novel

The events in the novel lead us to believe that this is a detective story.
The author, with suspicious persistence, offers just such an interpretation.

Lotman Yu. writes that “the very fact that the Franciscan monk of the 14th century, the Englishman Wilhelm, distinguished by his remarkable insight
Baskerville, refers the reader with his name to the story of the most famous detective feat of Sherlock Holmes, and his chronicler bears the name
Adsona (a clear allusion to Conan Doyle’s Watson) orients the reader quite clearly. This is also the role of references to drugs that Sherlock Holmes of the 14th century uses to maintain intellectual activity. Like his English counterpart, periods of indifference and prostration in his mental activity are interspersed with periods of excitement associated with chewing mysterious herbs. It was during these last periods that his logical abilities and intellectual strength were revealed in all their brilliance. The very first scenes introducing us to William of Baskerville seem to be parodic quotes from the epic of Sherlock Holmes: the monk accurately describes the appearance of a runaway horse, which he has never seen, and just as accurately “calculates” where it should be looked for, and then reconstructs the picture of the murder - the first of what happened within the walls of the ill-fated monastery, in which the plot of the novel unfolds, although I also did not witness it.”

Lotman Yu. suggests that this is a medieval detective story, and his hero is a former inquisitor (Latin inquisitor - investigator and researcher at the same time, inquistor rerom naturae - researcher of nature, so Wilhelm did not change his profession, but only changed the sphere of application of his logical abilities) - this Sherlock Holmes in the cassock of a Franciscan, who is called upon to unravel some extremely ingenious crime, neutralize the plans and fall like a punishing sword on the heads of the criminals. After all
Sherlock Holmes is not only a logician - he is also a policeman, Count of Monte Cristo - a sword in the hands of a Higher Power (Monte Cristo - Providence, Sherlock Holmes -
Law). He overtakes Evil and does not allow him to triumph.

However, in the novel by W. Eco, events do not develop at all according to the canons of a detective story, and the former inquisitor, Franciscan William of Baskerville, turns out to be a very strange Sherlock Holmes. The hopes that the abbot of the monastery and the readers place on him are most definitely not fulfilled: he always arrives too late. His witty syllogisms and thoughtful conclusions do not prevent any of the entire chain of crimes that make up the detective layer of the novel’s plot, and the mysterious manuscript, the search for which he devoted so much effort, energy and intelligence, perishes at the very last moment, slipping forever from his hands.

Y. Lotman writes: “In the end, the entire “detective” line of this strange detective turns out to be completely obscured by other plots. The reader’s interest switches to other events, and he begins to realize that he was simply fooled, that, having evoked in his memory the shadows of the hero of “The Hound of Baskerville” and his faithful companion-chronicler, the author invited us to take part in one game, while he himself is playing completely another. It is natural for the reader to try to figure out what game is being played with him and what the rules of this game are. He himself finds himself in the position of a detective, but the traditional questions that always trouble all Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Poirot: who and why committed (is committing) the murder (murders), are supplemented by a much more complex one: why and why the cunning semiotician from Milan, appearing in a triple mask: a Benedictine monk of a provincial German monastery of the 14th century, the famous historian of this order, Father J. Mabillon, and his mythical French translator, Abbot Vallee?

According to Lotman, the author seems to open two doors for the reader at once, leading in opposite directions. On one it says: detective story, on the other: historical novel. A hoax with a story about a bibliographic rarity allegedly found and then lost, as parodically and frankly, refers us to the stereotypical beginnings of historical novels, as the first chapters do to a detective story.

The historical moment to which the action of “The Name of the Rose” is timed is precisely defined in the novel. According to Adson, “several months before the events that will be described, Louis, having concluded an alliance with the defeated Frederick, entered Italy.” Louis of Bavaria, proclaimed emperor, entered Italy in 1327. This is how Niccolò Machiavelli describes the events against which the plot of the novel unfolds: “... Louis of Bavaria became his successor on the imperial throne. By that time, the papal throne had passed to John XXII, during his pontificate the emperor did not cease to persecute the Guelphs and the church, whose defenders were mainly King Robert and the Florentines. Thus began the wars that the Visconti waged in Lombardy against the Guelphs, and
Castruccio of Lucca in Tuscany against the Florentines Emperor
Louis, in order to raise the importance of his party and at the same time to be crowned, came to Italy.”

At the same time, severe conflicts tore the Catholic Church apart.
The Archbishop of the French city of Bordeaux, elected in 1305 to the papal throne under the name of Clement V, moved the seat of the papal curia from Rome to Avignon in the south of France (1309). King Philip of France
IV the Handsome, excommunicated by the previous pope Boniface in 1303, was given the opportunity to actively intervene in the affairs of the papacy and Italy.
Italy becomes an arena of rivalry between the French king and emperor
Holy Roman Empire (Germany). All these events are not directly described in Umberto Eco's novel. Only mentions of how Adson ended up in Italy, and, subsequently, a description of the enmity of “foreigners” and
“Italians” within the walls of the monastery serve as reflections of these unrest. But they form the background of the action and are invisibly present in the plot. The author (and monk-chronicler) touches on the internal church struggle in more detail.

The cardinal issue of the internal church struggle, reflecting the main social conflict of the era, was the issue of poverty and wealth. Founded at the beginning of the 13th century by Francis of Assisi, the Order of Minorites (younger brothers), later the Franciscans, preached the poverty of the church. In 1215, Pope Innocent III was reluctantly forced to recognize the legality of the order.

However, later, when the slogan of church poverty was picked up by militant popular heretical sects and became widespread among the common people, the attitude of the Curia towards the Franciscans became a very delicate issue. Gerard Segalelli from
Parma, who called for a return to the customs of the first Christians - community of property, compulsory labor for monks, severe simplicity of morals - was burned at the stake in 1296.

His teaching was taken up by Dolcino Torinelli from Novara (Piedmont), who became the head of a broad popular movement led by
"Apostolic brothers".

He preached the renunciation of property and the violent implementation of the early Christian utopia. Pope Clement V declared a crusade against Dolcino and his army entrenched on the mountain
Zebello and from 1305 to 1307 stubbornly resisted, overcoming hunger, snow drifts and epidemics.

One of the central events of the novel “The Name of the Rose” is an unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation between the pope and the emperor, who is trying to find allies in the Order of St. Francis. This episode in itself is insignificant, but it allows the reader to be drawn into the complex vicissitudes of the political and church struggle of the era.

On the periphery of the text there are references to the Templars and their reprisals, the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Humilians, the “Avignon captivity of the popes” comes up repeatedly in conversations, and philosophical and theological discussions of the era. All these movements remain behind the text, but the reader needs to navigate them in order to understand the balance of power in the novel, as Y. Lotman believes.

So, before us is a historical novel. Y. Lotman writes: “The author himself pushes the reader to precisely this conclusion in one of the autocomments to “The Name of the Rose.” Recalling the division of historical prose into works in the center of which are famous persons in history, and into those where the latter are relegated to the periphery, and the images of ordinary people created by the author's imagination act, W. Eco gives preference to the second category and as a model for which he supposedly followed, names
"The Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni. However, the author’s clues in “The Name of the Rose” are always cunning, and the parallel with Manzoni’s great work is another false clue given to the reader. The experience of the great romantic, of course, did not pass by U. Eco. They were prompted by the situation itself: the author is holding in his hands an ancient manuscript that accidentally came to him, interesting in content, but written in a barbaric language: “Lombard idioms - without number, phrases - inappropriately used, grammar - arbitrary, periods - uncoordinated. And then - exquisite Spanishisms.” “Mixing with amazing dexterity the most opposite properties, he manages to be both rude and affected at the same time on the same page, in the same period, in the same expression.”

According to Y. Lotman, the initial episode of “The Name of the Rose” takes on an ironic overtones. Viktor Shklovsky would call this an exposure of the technique.
But the more striking is the difference in the construction of the plot. Pushkin had reason to talk about the influence of Walter Scott on Manzoni: the adventures of a couple in love against the backdrop of widely described historical events, history filtered through the adventures of a common man. Plot structure
“The Name of the Rose” does not even remotely resemble such a scheme: the love affair is reduced to only one episode, which does not play a significant role in the composition, the entire action takes place inside the same very limited space - the monastery. A significant part of the text is reflections and conclusions. This is not the structure of a historical novel.

According to Lotman Yu. “The image of a labyrinth - one of the cross-cutting symbols for a wide variety of cultures - is, as it were, an emblem of W. Eco’s novel. But
“A labyrinth is essentially a crossroads of roads, some of which have no exits, ending in dead ends that must be passed through in order to open the path leading to the center of this strange web.” This author further notes that, unlike a web, a labyrinth is fundamentally asymmetrical.”

But every labyrinth implies its Theseus, the one who
"disenchant" its secrets and finds the way to the center. In the novel, this is, of course, William of Baskerville. It is he who will have to enter both doors - “detective” and “historical” - of the plot of our novel. Let's take a closer look at this figure. The hero does not belong to historical characters - he was entirely created by the author’s imagination. But he is connected by many threads with the era in which the tyranny of W. Eco placed him (as we will see, not only with it!).
Wilhelm arrived at the “monastery of crimes” (as Umberto Eco, by his own admission, initially intended to designate the scene of action) with some important mission.

The medieval world lived under the sign of supreme integrity.

Unity is divine, division comes from the devil. The unity of the church is embodied in the inquisitor, the unity of thought in Jorge, who, despite his blindness, memorizes a huge number of texts, completely, by heart, integrally. Such memory is capable of storing texts, but is not aimed at creating new ones, and the memory of blind Jorge is the model on which he builds his ideal library. In his view, a library is a gigantic special storage facility, a place where texts are kept intact, and not a place where old texts serve as starting points for creating new ones.

The symbol of integrity is opposed by the symbolic image of dismemberment and analysis. Heresies (“schisms”) fragment the monolithic universe of the Middle Ages and highlight personal relationships between man and God, man and the state, man and truth. Ultimately, this led to direct contact between man and God and eliminated the need for a church (the beginning of this trend dates back to the Waldensians, further development will pass through the centuries). In the field of thought, this led to analysis: fragmentation, critical examination, recombination of theses and the creation of new texts. Jorge embodies the spirit of dogma, Wilhelm - analysis. One creates a labyrinth, the other solves the mysteries of the way out of it. The mythological image of the labyrinth is associated with the rite of initiation, and Wilhelm is a fighter for the initiation of the spirit. Therefore, the library for him is not a place where dogmas are stored, but a supply of food for the critical mind.

The hidden plot core of the novel is the struggle for the second book.
"Poetics" of Aristotle. Wilhelm's desire to find a manuscript hidden in the labyrinth of the monastery library and Jorge's desire to prevent its discovery lie at the heart of the intellectual duel between these characters, the meaning of which is revealed to the reader only in the last pages of the novel. It's a fight for laughter. On the second day of his stay in the monastery, William “pulls” from Bentius the content of an important conversation that recently took place in the scriptorium. “Jorge said that it is inappropriate to add ridiculous drawings to books containing truths. And Venantius said that even Aristotle speaks of jokes and verbal games as means of the best knowledge of truths and that, therefore, laughter cannot be a bad thing if it contributes to the revelation of truths
Venantius, who knows very well... knew Greek very well, said that Aristotle deliberately dedicated a book to laughter, the second book of his Poetics, and that if such a great philosopher devotes an entire book to laughter, laughter must be a serious thing."

For Wilhelm, laughter is associated with a mobile, creative world, with a world open to freedom of judgment. Carnival frees the mind. But carnival has another face - the face of rebellion.

Cellarer Remigius explains to Wilhelm why he joined the rebellion
Dolcino: “...I can’t even understand why I did what I did then. You see, in the case of El Salvador, everything is quite understandable. He is from the serfs, his childhood is squalor, a famine... For him, Dolcin personified the struggle, the destruction of the power of the masters... But for me everything was different! My parents are city dwellers, I have never seen hunger! For me it was like... I don’t know how to say... Something like a huge holiday, like a carnival. Near Dolcina on the mountains, until we started eating the meat of our comrades who died in the battle... Until so many died of hunger that it was no longer possible to eat, and we threw the corpses from the slopes of Rebello to be eaten by vultures and wolves... And maybe even and then... we breathed air... how should I say? Freedom.

Until then, I didn’t know what freedom was.” “It was a riotous carnival, and at carnivals everything is always upside down.”

Umberto Eco, according to Y. Lotman, knows the theory of carnival very well
M. M. Bakhtin and the deep mark that she left not only in science, but also in the social thought of Europe in the mid-20th century. He knows and takes into account both the works of Huizinga and books like “The Festival of Jesters” by X. G.
Cox. But his interpretation of laughter and carnival, which turns everything “upside down,” does not completely coincide with Bakhtin’s. Laughter does not always serve freedom.

According to Lutman Yu., Eco’s novel is, of course, a creation of today’s thought and could not have been created even a quarter of a century ago. It shows the impact of historical research, which in recent decades has subjected many deeply held ideas about the Middle Ages to revision. After the work of the French historian Le Goff, defiantly entitled “For a New Middle Ages,” the attitude towards this era underwent a broad rethink. In the works of historians Philippe Aries, Jacques Delumeau
(France), Carlo Ginzburg (Italy), A. Ya. Gurevich (USSR) and many others, interest in the flow of life, in
“non-historical personalities”, “mentality”, i.e. to those features of the historical worldview that people themselves consider so natural that they simply do not notice, to heresies as a reflection of this popular mentality. This radically changed the relationship between the historian and the historical novelist, belonging to that most artistically significant tradition that came from Walter Scott and to which Manzoni, Pushkin, and Leo Tolstoy belonged (historical novels about “great men” rarely led to artistic success , but were often popular with the most indiscriminate reader).
If previously a novelist could say: I am interested in what historians do not do, now the historian introduces the reader to those corners of the past that were previously visited only by novelists.

Umberto Eco completes this circle: a historian and a novelist at the same time, he writes a novel, but looks through the eyes of a historian, whose scientific position is shaped by the ideas of our days. An informed reader will also detect in the novel echoes of discussions about the medieval utopia of the “Kokani country”
(Kukans) and extensive literature about the inverted world (interest in texts,
“turned inside out” has acquired an epidemic character in the last two decades). But not only a modern view of the Middle Ages - in Umberto Eco’s novel the reader is constantly faced with a discussion of issues that affect not only the historical, but also the topical interests of readers. We will immediately discover the problem of drug addiction, and debates about homosexuality, and reflections on the nature of left and right extremism, and discussions about the unconscious partnership of the victim and the executioner, as well as the psychology of torture - all this equally belongs to both
XIV and XX centuries.

The novel persistently echoes a cross-cutting motif: utopia realized with the help of blood flows (Dolcino), and serving the truth with the help of lies
(inquisitor). This is a dream of justice, the apostles of which do not spare either their own or others’ lives. Broken by torture, Remigius shouts to his pursuers: “We wanted better peace, tranquility and goodness for everyone. We wanted to kill the war, the war that you bring into the world. All wars are because of your stinginess! And now you are stabbing us in the eyes with the fact that for the sake of justice and happiness we shed a little blood! That's the whole problem! The fact is that we spilled too little of it! And it had to be so that all the water in Carnasco, all the water that day in Stavello turned scarlet.”

But not only utopia is dangerous, any truth that excludes doubt is dangerous.
Thus, even Wilhelm’s student is at some point ready to exclaim:
“It’s good that the Inquisition arrived in time,” because he “was overcome by a thirst for truth.” Truth undoubtedly breeds fanaticism. Truth without a doubt, a world without laughter, faith without irony - this is not only the ideal of medieval asceticism, it is also the program of modern totalitarianism. And when at the end of the novel the opponents stand face to face, we see images of not only the 14th, but also the 20th century. “You are the devil,” Wilhelm says to Jorge.

Eco does not dress up modernity in the clothes of the Middle Ages and does not force Franciscans and Benedictines to discuss the problems of general disarmament or human rights. He simply discovered that Wilhelm's time
Baskerville, and the time of his author is one era, that from the Middle Ages to the present day we are struggling with the same questions and that, therefore, it is possible, without violating historical verisimilitude, to create a topical novel from the life of the 14th century.

The correctness of this thought is confirmed by one significant consideration.
The action of the novel takes place in a monastery, the library of which contains a rich collection of Apocalypses, once brought by Jorge from
Spain. Jorge is full of eschatological expectations and infects the entire monastery with them. He preaches the power of the Antichrist, who has already subjugated the whole world, entwined it with his conspiracy, and has become the prince of this world: “He is intense in his speeches and in his works, in cities and in estates, in his arrogant universities and in cathedrals.” The power of the Antichrist exceeds the power of God, the power of Evil is stronger than the power of Good. This sermon sows fear, but it is also born of fear. In an era when the ground is slipping from under people's feet, the past is losing trust, and the future is painted in tragic colors, people are engulfed by an epidemic of fear. Under the power of fear, people turn into a crowd, overwhelmed by atavistic myths. They paint a terrible picture of the victorious march of the devil, imagine mysterious and powerful conspiracies of his servants, begin a witch hunt, and search for dangerous but invisible enemies. An atmosphere of mass hysteria is created when all legal guarantees and all the gains of civilization are canceled. It is enough to say about a person “sorcerer”, “witch”, “enemy of the people”, “freemason”, “intellectual” or any other word that in a given historical situation is a sign of doom, and his fate is decided: he automatically moves to the place of the “culprit” all troubles, a participant in an invisible conspiracy,” any defense of which is tantamount to admitting one’s own involvement in an insidious host.

Umberto Eco's novel begins with a quotation from the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word" - and ends with a Latin quotation, melancholy reporting that the rose withered, but the word "rose", the name "rose" remained. The true hero of the novel is the Word. Wilhelm and Jorge serve him in different ways. People create words, but words control people. And the science that studies the place of the word in culture, the relationship between the word and man, is called semiotics. “The Name of the Rose” is a novel about words and people—it is a semiotic novel.

It can be assumed that it is no coincidence that the novel takes place in a medieval monastery. Given Eco's penchant for understanding origins, you can better imagine what prompted him to write The Name of the Rose in the late 70s. In those years, it seemed that Europe had only a few “minutes” left before the apocalyptic “midnight” in the form of a military and ideological confrontation between two systems, the seething of various movements from ultra to
“greens” and sexual minorities in one common cauldron of intertwined concepts, heated speeches, and dangerous actions. Eco challenged.

By describing the background of modern ideas and movements, he thereby tried to cool their ardor. In general, it is a well-known art practice to kill or poison fictional characters for the edification of the living.

Eco directly writes that in the “Middle Ages the roots of all our modern
“hot” problems,” and the feuds of monks of different orders are not much different from the fights between Trotskyists and Stalinists.

3. Notes on the margins of “The Name of the Rose”

The novel is accompanied by “Marginal Notes” of “The Name of the Rose,” in which the author brilliantly talks about the process of creating his novel.

The novel ends with a Latin phrase, which translates as follows: “A rose with the same name - with our names henceforth.” As the author himself notes, it raised many questions, so the “Marginal Notes” of “The Name of the Rose” begin with an “explanation” of the meaning of the title.

“The title “The Name of the Rose” arose almost by accident,” writes Umberto Eco, “and it suited me, because the rose as a symbolic figure is so rich in meaning that it has almost no meaning: the rose is mystical, and the tender rose lived no longer than the rose, war Scarlet and White roses, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, Rosicrucians 18, a rose smells like a rose, call it a rose or not, rosa fresca aulentissima. The title, as intended, disorients the reader. He cannot favor any one interpretation. Even if he gets to the implied nominalist interpretation of the last sentence, he will still only arrive at it at the very end, having made a host of other assumptions. The title should confuse thoughts, not discipline them.”

At first, writes U. Eco, he wanted to call the book “Abbey of Crimes,” but such a title would set readers up for a detective plot and would confuse those who are only interested in intrigue.” It is the author’s dream to call the novel “Adson of Melk,” because this hero stands aside, takes a kind of neutral position. The title “The Name of the Rose,” notes U. Eco, suited him,
“because the rose, as it were, is a symbolic figure so saturated with meanings that it has almost no meaning... The name, as intended, disorients the reader...
The title should confuse thoughts, not discipline them." In this way, the writer emphasizes that the text lives its own life, often independent of it. Hence new, different readings and interpretations, to which the title of the novel should set the mood. And it is no coincidence that the author placed this Latin quotation from a 12th-century work at the end of the text so that the reader would make various assumptions, thoughts and compare, be perplexed and argue.

“I wrote a novel because I wanted to,” writes the author.
I believe that this is reason enough to sit down and start talking. Man is a storytelling animal from birth. I started writing in March 1978. I wanted to poison the monk. I think that every novel is born from such thoughts. The rest of the pulp grows on its own."

The novel takes place in the Middle Ages. The author writes: “At first I was going to settle the monks in a modern monastery (I came up with a monk-investigator, a subscriber to the Manifesto). But since any monastery, and especially an abbey, still lives with the memory of the Middle Ages, I woke up the medievalist in me from hibernation and sent me to rummage through my own archive. 1956 monograph on medieval aesthetics, hundred pages 1969 on the same topic; a few articles in between; studies in medieval culture in 1962, in connection with Joyce; finally, in 1972, a large study on the Apocalypse and on illustrations for the interpretation of the Apocalypse by Beat of Lieban: in general, my Middle Ages were maintained in combat readiness. I raked out a bunch of materials - notes, photocopies, extracts. All this has been selected since 1952 for the most incomprehensible purposes: for the history of freaks, for a book about medieval encyclopedias, for the theory of lists... At some point I decided that since the Middle Ages are my mental daily routine, it would be easiest to place the action directly in the Middle Ages.” .

“So, I decided not only that the story would be about the Middle Ages. I decided that the story would come from the Middle Ages, from the mouth of a chronicler of that era,”
- writes the author. For this purpose, Umberto re-read a huge number of medieval chronicles, “learned rhythm, naivety.”

According to Eco, working on a novel is a cosmological event:
“To tell a story, first of all, it is necessary to create a certain world, arranging it as best as possible and thinking through it in detail. History played a special role in the world I created. Therefore, I endlessly re-read medieval chronicles and, as I read, I realized that I would inevitably have to introduce things into the novel that I had never even thought of initially, for example, the struggle for poverty and the persecution of half-brothers by the Inquisition.
Let's say, why did half-brothers appear in my book, and with them the fourteenth century? If I were to write a medieval story, I should take
XIII or XII century - I knew these eras much better. But a detective was needed. An Englishman is best (intertextual quotation). This detective had to be distinguished by his love of observation and special ability to interpret external signs. Such qualities can only be found among the Franciscans, and only after Roger Bacon. At the same time, we find a developed theory of signs only among the Ockhamists. Or rather, it also existed before, but earlier the interpretation of signs was either purely symbolic in nature, or saw only ideas and universals behind the signs. It was only from Bacon to Occam, in this single period, that signs were used to study individuals. So I realized that the plot would have to unfold in the fourteenth century, and I was very dissatisfied. This was much more difficult for me. If so - new readings, and behind them - a new discovery. I firmly understood that a fourteenth-century Franciscan, even an Englishman, could not be indifferent to the discussion of poverty. Especially if he is a friend or student
Occam or just a person of his circle. By the way, at first I wanted to make Occam himself the investigator, but then I abandoned this idea, because as a person I don’t like Venerabilis Inceptor6 much.”
.

The author explains the reason for choosing this time period in his novel:
“Why is the action dated precisely at the end of November 1327?
Because by December Mikhail Tszensky was already in Avignon. This is what it means to fully organize the world of a historical novel. Some elements - such as the number of steps of the staircase - depend on the will of the author, while others, such as Mikhail’s movements, depend only on the real world, which, purely by chance, and only in novels of this type, wedges itself into the arbitrary world of the narrative.

According to Eco, “the world we have created itself indicates where the plot should go.” And indeed, having chosen the Middle Ages for his novel,
Eco only directs the action, which unfolds on its own, according to the laws and logic of the events of those years. And this is especially interesting.

In his notes, Eco reveals to the reader the entire “kitchen of creation” of his work. So we learn that the choice of certain historical details caused some difficulties for the writer:

“There was some trouble with the labyrinth. All the labyrinths I knew—and I used Santarcangeli’s excellent monograph—were roofless. Everything is completely intricate, with many whirlpools. But I needed a labyrinth with a roof (who has ever seen a library without a roof!). And not very difficult.
There is almost no ventilation in the labyrinth, overloaded with corridors and dead ends.
And ventilation was necessary for a fire. After fiddling around for two or three months, I built the required labyrinth myself. And still, in the end, he pierced it with slits-embrasures, otherwise, when it came to it, there might not have been enough air.”

Umberto Eco writes: “I had to fence off a closed space, a concentric universe, and in order to close it better, it was necessary to reinforce the unity of place with the unity of time (the unity of action, alas, remained very problematic). Hence the Benedictine abbey, where all life is measured by canonical hours.”

In his “Notes,” U. Eco explains the basic concepts of postmodernism, its historical and aesthetic origins. The author notes that he sees the Middle Ages “in the depths of any subject, even one that seems not to be connected with the Middle Ages, but is in fact connected. Everything is connected." In the medieval chronicles, W. Eco discovered the “echo of intertextuality”, for “all books talk about other books... every story retells a story that has already been told.” The novel, the writer claims, is a whole world created by the author, and this cosmological structure lives by its own laws and requires the author to comply with them: “Characters must obey the laws of the world in which they live. That is, the writer is a prisoner of his own premises." W. Eco writes about the game between the author and the reader, which separates the writer from the reader. It “consisted of highlighting the figure of Adson in old age as often as possible, allowing him to comment on what he sees and hears as a young Adson…. The figure of Adson is also important because he, acting as a participant and recorder of events, does not always understand and will not understand in his old age what he writes about. “My goal,” notes the author, “was to make everything clear through the words of someone who does not understand anything.”

W. Eco in “Notes...” emphasizes the need for an objective depiction of reality. Art is an escape from personal feeling,” for literature is called upon to “create a reader,” someone who is ready to play the author’s game. The reader is naturally interested in the plot, and here it is immediately apparent that “The Name of the Rose” is a detective novel, but it differs from others in that “little is revealed in it, and the investigator is defeated. And this is no coincidence, notes U. Eco, since “a book cannot have only one plot. It doesn’t happen like that.” The author talks about the existence of several labyrinths in his novel, primarily the manneristic one, the way out of which can be found by trial and error. But
Wilhelm lives in the world of a rhizome - a grid in which lines - paths are intersected, therefore, there is no center and no exit: “My text is, in essence, the history of labyrinths. The writer pays special attention to irony, which he calls a metalinguistic game. A writer can participate in this game, taking it completely seriously, even sometimes without understanding it: “This,” notes W. Eco, “is the distinctive property (but also the insidiousness) of ironic creativity.” The author's conclusion is that “obsessions exist; they have no owner; the books speak to each other and a real judicial investigation must show that we are the culprits.”

Thus, in his “Notes,” Umberto Eco reveals not only the true meaning of the creation of his work, but also the entire technology of writing it.

Thanks to Umberto Eco's extensive knowledge of the history of the Middle Ages, his knowledge of semiotics, literature, criticism, as well as his painstaking work on the word, the entertaining plot, and the choice of details, we get great pleasure from reading a historical novel.

Conclusion

Before Umberto Eco published his first work of fiction, the novel The Name of the Rose, in 1980, on the threshold of his fiftieth birthday, he was known in academic circles in Italy and the entire scientific world as an authoritative specialist in the philosophy of the Middle Ages and in the field of semiotics - the science of signs Thus, it is no coincidence that his novel takes place in the Middle Ages.

Umberto Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose" implements concepts that feed the author's scientific idea that it represents a translation of Umberto Eco's semiotic and cultural ideas into the language of a literary text. This gives reason to read “The Name of the Rose” in different ways.

“I wanted the reader to have fun,” Eco later wrote. Indeed, when reading this novel you truly get pleasure, and in addition you get acquainted with the history of the Middle Ages. It is no coincidence that after the publication of the book, the number of students enrolled in the department of history of the Middle Ages increased sharply.

All this suggests that Umrebto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose” is a complete and accurate guide to the Middle Ages. Anthony Burgess writes in his review: “People read Arthur Heilib to find out what life is like at an airport. If you read this book, you will not have the slightest uncertainty about how the monastery functioned in the 14th century.”

The Brazilian priest, one of the main representatives of “liberation theology” Leonardo Boff writes about Eco’s novel: “This is not only a Gothic story from the life of an Italian Benedictine monastery of the 14th century.
Undoubtedly, the author uses all the cultural realities of the era (with an abundance of detail and erudition), maintaining the greatest historical accuracy. But all this is for the sake of issues that remain as highly significant today as they were yesterday. There is a struggle between two life projects, personal and social: one project stubbornly strives to preserve what exists, to preserve it by all means, even to the point of destroying other people and self-destruction; the second project strives for the permanent discovery of something new, even at the cost of its own destruction.”

List of used literature

1. Andreev L. Artistic synthesis and postmodernism // Issues of literature.-

2001.- No. 1.- p.3-38

2. Zatonkiy D. Postmodernism in the historical interior // Questions of literature. - 1996. - No. 3. - p. 182-205.

3. Kostyukovich E. Orbits Eco // Eco U. Name of the Rose. - M., 1998. - P. 645-649

4. Lotman Yu. Exit from the labyrinth // Eco U. Name of the rose. — M: Book Chamber,

1989.- p.468-481.

5. Lee Marshall and Umberto Eco. Under the Network (interview)//"The Art of Cinema"

6. Reingold S. “Poison a monk” or human values ​​according to Umberto

Eco //Foreign literature. -1994.-No. 4.

7. Umberto Eco Internal reviews. Translation from Italian by Elena

Kostyukovich // “Foreign Literature” 1997, No. 5

8. Travina E. Umberto IVF // Reality is a fantasy that people believe in.

Questions of literature. 1996 No. 5

9. Eco U. Notes on the margins of “The Name of the Rose” // The Name of the Rose. – M: Book Chamber,

1989- p.425-467.
10. Eco U. Name of the rose. Detective. Vol. 2. – M.: Book Chamber, 1989. – 496 p.

Umberto Eco's book “The Name of the Rose” is mysterious and philosophical. It is intended for those readers who like to look in depth, penetrate to the very essence, consider a topic from different angles in order to know everything about it. This book will not only be an interesting detective story, but also a work that will make you see much more and think about serious issues. The history of the Middle Ages here echoes the history of the 20th century, discussions and conflicts about the role of religion in the life of society reach their peak, and new mysteries constantly appear.

Events take place in the first half of the 14th century. In the center of Europe, in a Benedictine abbey, a bloody murder took place. This place is considered the center of all sciences. To investigate this serious matter, William of Baskerville is sent there. He is distinguished by his extraordinary thinking and ability to unravel complex crimes. In the past, he was an inquisitor and fought against heretics. His student is traveling with him, who wants to observe the teacher at work. In addition, this will be a good opportunity to gain new knowledge. But the number of those killed increases, and it becomes clear that in this case everything is much more complicated than it looks. It is necessary to determine the deeper reasons for what happened.

On our website you can download the book “The Name of the Rose” by Umberto Eco for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.

Year of writing:

1980

Reading time:

Description of the work:

In 1980, Italian writer Umberto Eco finished writing his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which was published in Italian that same year. Soon a Russian translation of the novel appeared, completed by Elena Kostyukovich.

In 1986, “The Name of the Rose” was filmed by director Jean-Jacques Annaud, but the author of the novel, Umberto Eco, expressed dissatisfaction with the film, although the film received many awards and won considerable success. After this incident, Eco did not allow anyone to film his works. Read the summary of the novel "The Name of the Rose".

Summary of the novel
Rose name

The Notes of Father Adson from Melk fell into the hands of a future translator and publisher in Prague in 1968. On the title page of the French book from the middle of the last century it is stated that it is a transcription from a Latin text of the 17th century, allegedly reproducing, in turn, the manuscript , created by a German monk at the end of the 14th century. Investigations undertaken regarding the author of the French translation, the Latin original, as well as the identity of Adson himself, did not bring results. Subsequently, the strange book (possibly a fake, existing in a single copy) disappears from the view of the publisher, who added another link to the unreliable chain of retellings of this medieval story.

In his declining years, the Benedictine monk Adson recalls the events that he witnessed and participated in in 1327. Europe was rocked by political and church strife. Emperor Louis confronts Pope John XXII. At the same time, the pope is fighting the monastic order of the Franciscans, in which the reform movement of non-acquisitive spiritualists, who had previously been subjected to severe persecution by the papal curia, prevailed. The Franciscans unite with the emperor and become a significant force in the political game.

During this turmoil, Adson, then still a young novice, accompanies the English Franciscan William of Baskerville on a journey through the cities and largest monasteries of Italy. William - a thinker and theologian, a natural scientist, famous for his powerful analytical mind, a friend of William of Occam and a student of Roger Bacon - carries out the emperor's task to prepare and conduct a preliminary meeting between the imperial delegation of the Franciscans and representatives of the Curia, in the abbey where it is to take place, William and Adson arrive a few days before the embassies arrive. The meeting should take the form of a dispute about the poverty of Christ and the Church; its purpose is to clarify the positions of the parties and the possibility of a future visit of the Franciscan general to the papal throne in Avignon.

Before even entering the monastery, Wilhelm surprises the monks who went out in search of the runaway horse with precise deductive conclusions. And the abbot of the abbey immediately turns to him with a request to conduct an investigation into the strange death that happened in the monastery. The body of the young monk Adelmo was found at the bottom of the cliff; perhaps he was thrown out of the tower of a tall building hanging over the abyss, called here the Temple. The abbot hints that he knows the true circumstances of Adelmo's death, but he is bound by secret confession, and therefore the truth must come from other, unsealed lips.

Wilhelm receives permission to interview all monks without exception and examine any premises of the monastery - except for the famous monastery library. The largest in the Christian world, comparable to the semi-legendary libraries of the infidels, it is located on the top floor of the Temple; Only the librarian and his assistant have access to it; only they know the layout of the storehouse, built like a labyrinth, and the system for arranging books on the shelves. Other monks: copyists, rubricators, translators, flocking here from all over Europe, work with books in the copying room - the scriptorium. The librarian alone decides when and how to provide a book to the person who requests it, and whether to provide it at all, for there are many pagan and heretical works here.

In the scriptorium, William and Adson meet the librarian Malachi, his assistant Berengar, the translator from Greek, an adherent of Aristotle, Venantius, and the young rhetorician Benzius. The late Adelm, a skilled draftsman, decorated the margins of manuscripts with fantastic miniatures. As soon as the monks laugh, looking at them, the blind brother Jorge appears in the scriptorium with a reproach that ridicule and idle talk are indecent in the monastery. This man, glorious in years, righteousness and learning, lives with the feeling of the onset of the last times and in anticipation of the imminent appearance of the Antichrist. Examining the abbey, Wilhelm comes to the conclusion that Adelm, most likely, was not killed, but committed suicide by throwing himself down from the monastery wall, and the body was subsequently transferred under the Temple by a landslide,

But that same night, the corpse of Venantius was discovered in a barrel of fresh blood from slaughtered pigs. Wilhelm, studying the traces, determines that the monk was killed somewhere else, most likely in Khramin, and thrown into a barrel already dead. But meanwhile there are no wounds, no damage or signs of struggle on the body.

Noticing that Benzius is more excited than others, and Berengar is openly frightened, Wilhelm immediately interrogates both. Berengar admits that he saw Adelm on the night of his death: the draftsman’s face was like the face of a dead man, and Adelm said that he was cursed and doomed to eternal torment, which he described to his shocked interlocutor very convincingly. Benzius reports that two days before the death of Adelmus, a debate took place in the scriptorium about the admissibility of the ridiculous in the depiction of the divine and that it is better to represent holy truths in rude bodies than in noble ones. In the heat of the argument, Berengar inadvertently let slip, although very vaguely, about something carefully hidden in the library. The mention of this was associated with the word “Africa”, and in the catalog, among the designations understandable only to the librarian, Benzius saw the “limit of Africa” visa, but when, becoming interested, he asked for a book with this visa, Malachi stated that all these books were lost. Benzius also talks about what he witnessed while following Berengar after the dispute. Wilhelm receives confirmation of the version of Adelm's suicide: apparently, in exchange for some service that could be related to Berengar's capabilities as an assistant librarian, the latter persuaded the draftsman to the sin of Sodomy, the severity of which Adelm, however, could not bear and hastened to confess to the blind Jorge, but instead absolution received a formidable promise of inevitable and terrible punishment. The consciousness of the local monks is too excited, on the one hand, by a painful desire for book knowledge, on the other, by the constantly terrifying memory of the devil and hell, and this often forces them to literally see with their own eyes something they read or hear about. Adelm considers himself to have already fallen into hell and, in despair, decides to take his own life.

William tries to examine the manuscripts and books on Venantius's desk in the scriptorium. But first Jorge, then Benzius, under various pretexts, distract him. Wilhelm asks Malachi to put someone on guard at the table, and at night, together with Adson, he returns here through the discovered underground passage, which the librarian uses after he locks the doors of the Temple from the inside in the evening. Among the papers of Venantius, they find a parchment with incomprehensible extracts and cryptographic signs, but on the table there is no book that William saw here during the day. Someone makes their presence known in the scriptorium with a careless sound. Wilhelm gives chase and suddenly the light of the lantern catches the book that the fugitive dropped, but the unknown man manages to grab it before Wilhelm and escape.

At night, fear guards the library stronger than locks and prohibitions. Many monks believe that terrible creatures and the souls of dead librarians wander among books in the dark. Wilhelm is skeptical about such superstitions and does not miss the opportunity to study the vault, where Adson experiences the effects of illusion-generating distorting mirrors and a lamp soaked in a vision-inducing composition. The labyrinth turns out to be more complicated than Wilhelm expected, and only by chance they manage to discover the exit. From the alarmed abbot they learn about the disappearance of Berengar.

The dead assistant librarian is found only a day later in a bathhouse located next to the monastery hospital. The herbalist and healer Severin draws Wilhelm's attention to the fact that Berengar has traces of some substance on his fingers. The herbalist says that he saw the same ones at Venantius, when the corpse was washed from the blood. In addition, Berengar's tongue turned black - apparently the monk was poisoned before he drowned in the water. Severin says that once upon a time he kept an extremely poisonous potion, the properties of which he himself did not know, and it later disappeared under strange circumstances. Malachi, the abbot and Berengar knew about the poison.

Meanwhile, embassies are coming to the monastery. Inquisitor Bernard Guy arrives with the papal delegation. Wilhelm does not hide his dislike for him personally and his methods. Bernard announces that from now on he himself will investigate incidents in the monastery, which, in his opinion, strongly smack of the devil.

Wilhelm and Adson again enter the library to draw up a plan for the labyrinth. It turns out that the storage rooms are marked with letters, which, if you go through them in a certain order, form trick words and country names. The “limit of Africa” is also discovered - a disguised and tightly closed room, but they do not find a way to enter it. Bernard Guy detained and accused of witchcraft the doctor's assistant and a village girl, whom he brings at night to gratify the lust of his patron for the remains of the monastery meals; Adson had also met her the day before and could not resist the temptation. Now the girl’s fate is decided - as a witch she will go to the stake.

A fraternal discussion between the Franciscans and representatives of the pope turns into a vulgar fight, during which Severin informs Wilhelm, who remained aside from the massacre, that he found a strange book in his laboratory. Their conversation is heard by the blind Jorge, but Benzius also guesses that Severin discovered something left from Berengar. The dispute, which resumed after a general pacification, was interrupted by the news that the herbalist was found dead in the hospital and the murderer had already been captured.

The herbalist's skull was crushed by a metal celestial globe standing on the laboratory table. Wilhelm is looking for traces of the same substance on Severin’s fingers as Berengar and Venantius, but the herbalist’s hands are covered with leather gloves used when working with dangerous drugs. The cellarer Remigius is caught at the scene of the crime, who tries in vain to justify himself and declares that he came to the hospital when Severin was already dead. Benzius tells William that he was one of the first to run in here, then watched those entering and was sure: Malachi was already here, waited in a niche behind the curtain, and then quietly mixed with other monks. Wilhelm is convinced that no one could have taken the big book out of here secretly and, if the murderer is Malachi, it must still be in the laboratory. Wilhelm and Adson begin their search, but lose sight of the fact that sometimes ancient manuscripts were bound several times into one volume. As a result, the book goes unnoticed by them among others that belonged to Severin, and ends up with the more perceptive Benzius.

Bernard Guy holds a trial over the cellarer and, having convicted him of once belonging to one of the heretical movements, forces him to accept the blame for the murders in the abbey. The inquisitor is not interested in who actually killed the monks, but he seeks to prove that the former heretic, now declared a murderer, shared the views of the Franciscan spiritualists. This allows him to disrupt the meeting, which, apparently, was the purpose for which he was sent here by the pope.

To William’s demand to give the book back, Benzius replies that, without even starting to read, he returned it to Malachi, from whom he received an offer to take the vacant position as an assistant librarian. A few hours later, during a church service, Malachi dies in convulsions, his tongue is black and there are marks on his fingers that are already familiar to William.

The abbot announces to William that the Franciscan did not live up to his expectations and the next morning he must leave the monastery with Adson. Wilhelm objects that he has known about the sodomy monks, the settling of scores between whom the abbot considered the cause of the crimes, for a long time. However, this is not the real reason: those who know about the existence of the “limit of Africa” in the library are dying. The abbot cannot hide that William’s words led him to some kind of guess, but he insists all the more firmly on the Englishman’s departure; Now he intends to take matters into his own hands and under his own responsibility.

But Wilhelm is not going to retreat, because he has come close to the decision. By chance, Adson manages to read the key in the secret writing of Venantius that opens the “limit of Africa.” On the sixth night of their stay in the abbey, they enter the secret room of the library. Blind Jorge is waiting for them inside.

Wilhelm expected to meet him here. The very omissions of the monks, entries in the library catalog and some facts allowed him to find out that Jorge was once a librarian, and when he felt that he was going blind, he first taught his first successor, then Malachi. Neither one nor the other could work without his help and did not take a single step without asking him. The abbot was also dependent on him, since he received his position with his help. For forty years the blind man has been the sovereign master of the monastery. And he believed that some of the library's manuscripts should forever remain hidden from anyone's eyes. When, due to the fault of Berengar, one of them - perhaps the most important - left these walls, Jorge made every effort to bring her back. This book is the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, considered lost, and is dedicated to laughter and the funny in art, rhetoric, and the skill of persuasion. In order for its existence to remain a secret, Jorge does not hesitate to commit a crime, because he is convinced: if laughter is sanctified by the authority of Aristotle, the entire established medieval hierarchy of values ​​will collapse, and the culture nurtured in monasteries remote from the world, the culture of the chosen and initiated, will swept away by the urban, grassroots, area.

Jorge admits that he understood from the very beginning: sooner or later Wilhelm would discover the truth, and watched how step by step the Englishman approached it. He hands Wilhelm a book, for the desire to see which five people have already paid with their lives, and offers to read it. But the Franciscan says that he has unraveled this devilish trick of his, and restores the course of events. Many years ago, having heard someone in the scriptorium expressing interest in the “limit of Africa,” the still sighted Jorge steals poison from Severin, but does not immediately use it. But when Berengar, out of boasting to Adelmo, one day behaved unrestrainedly, the already blind old man goes upstairs and saturates the pages of the book with poison. Adelmo, who agreed to a shameful sin in order to touch the secret, did not take advantage of the information obtained at such a price, but, seized with mortal horror after confessing to Jorge, he tells Venantius about everything. Venantius gets to the book, but in order to separate the soft parchment sheets, he has to wet his fingers on his tongue. He dies before he can leave the Temple. Berengar finds the body and, fearing that the investigation will inevitably reveal what happened between him and Adelm, transfers the corpse to a barrel of blood. However, he also became interested in the book, which he snatched almost from Wilhelm’s hands in the scriptorium. He brings him to the hospital, where he can read at night without fear of being noticed by anyone. And when the poison begins to take effect, he rushes into the bath in the vain hope that the water will quench the flames that are devouring him from the inside. This is how the book gets to Severin. Jorge's messenger, Malachi, kills the herbalist, but dies himself, wanting to find out what is so forbidden in the item that made him a murderer. The last in this row is the abbot. After a conversation with Wilhelm, he demanded an explanation from Jorge, moreover: he demanded to open the “limit of Africa” and put an end to the secrecy established in the library by the blind man and his predecessors. Now he is suffocating in a stone bag of another underground passage to the library, where Jorge locked him and then broke the door control mechanisms.

“So the dead died in vain,” says Wilhelm: now the book has been found, and he managed to protect himself from Jorge’s poison. But in fulfillment of his plan, the elder is ready to accept death himself. Jorge tears the book and eats the poisoned pages, and when Wilhelm tries to stop him, he runs, accurately navigating the library from memory. The lamp in the hands of the pursuers still gives them some advantage. However, the overtaken blind man manages to take away the lamp and throw it aside. Spilled oil starts a fire;

Wilhelm and Adson rush to get water, but return too late. The efforts of all the brethren, raised by alarm, lead nowhere; The fire bursts out and spreads from the Temple, first to the church, then to the rest of the buildings.

Before Adson’s eyes, the richest monastery turns into ashes. The abbey burns for three days. By the end of the third day, the monks, having collected the little that they managed to save, leave the smoking ruins as a place cursed by God.

Please note that the summary of the novel “The Name of the Rose” does not reflect the full picture of events and characteristics of the characters. We recommend that you read the full version of the work.

In which there are several plot meanings. Not lines, but precisely the author’s ideas. “The Name of the Rose” is one such book. On the one hand, this is a detective story, with murders and an investigator ala Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. But on the other hand, this is a scientific treatise on the Middle Ages. About the history of religion. About monks and monasteries. Oh... Actually, a lot of things. The book is exciting and interesting even for those who don't like history. In addition, there is a lot of thinking and philosophizing on a variety of topics in life. It is noteworthy that when we were in Paris, the guide, standing near Notre Dame Cathedral, talked about this particular work. And I read this book just on the way to France.

“The Name of the Rose” (Italian: Il nome della Rosa) is the first novel by the Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980. By the way, it was probably extremely difficult for the translators to transport the novel, because the story is told on behalf of a monk who lived during the Middle Ages. How to adapt the language? Make it Old Russian? This is also the highlight of this book! Lots of spoilers ahead!

The plot of the novel “The Name of the Rose” (material from Wikipedia)

Introduction

The main characters, William of Baskerville and his young companion Adson of Melk, have to investigate the death of a certain Adelmo of Otranto, a monk of the Benedictine monastery. The action takes place at the end of November 1327 in an unnamed location, with a vague indication of the border of Liguria, Piedmont and France, that is, in the north-west of Italy. The plot unfolds over the course of a week. Wilhelm, whose original purpose was to prepare a meeting between the theologians of Pope John XXII and Emperor Louis IV of Bavaria, must now confirm his reputation as a learned man and former famous inquisitor.

Main events

Library

The abbot of the monastery Abbon unreasonably does not allow the heroes into the library, meanwhile there is a version that Adelm, the first to die, fell from the window of the book depository. The library is a labyrinth located on the third floor of the Temple - a tower that amazes Adson with its size, splendor and symbolic architectural form. On the second floor there is a scriptorium in which the monks copy manuscripts. Here two monastic parties collided - Italians and foreigners. The former advocate free access to all books and work with the people's language, while the latter - conservatives - received leadership positions (the German Malachi is a librarian, his assistant is the Englishman Berengar, and the “gray eminence” is the Spaniard Jorge) and therefore do not share the aspirations of the Italians . In order to understand the reason for what is happening, Wilhelm and Adson secretly enter the library at night. The heroes get lost, meet ghosts, which turn out to be traps, a trick of the human mind. The first foray yielded nothing - having difficulty getting out of the labyrinth, Wilhelm and Adson doubt their own abilities and decide to solve the mystery of the labyrinth “from the outside.”

Nomen nudum

The next night, Adson, on his own, driven by emotional excitement, enters the library, safely descends to the first floor (where the kitchen is) and meets there a girl who gave herself to the cellarer for food. Adson has a relationship with her that is reprehensible for a novice.

Subsequently, he realizes that, having lost his beloved, he is even deprived of the last consolation - to cry, saying her name. Probably, this episode is directly related to the title of the novel (according to another version, the title refers to the rhetorical question in the dispute between realists and nominalists - “What remains of the name of the rose after the rose disappears?”).

Dispute on the Poverty of Christ

Then representatives of the emperor gather at the monastery - mainly Franciscans (like brother William) led by the general of the order - Michael Tsezensky, and the papal embassy led by the inquisitor Bernard Guy and the Podget cardinal. The official purpose of the meeting is to discuss the conditions under which Mikhail Tsezensky will be able to arrive in Avignon to Pope John to give explanations. The pope considers heresy the doctrine proclaimed by the Perugia Chapter of the Franciscan Order that Christ and the apostles had no property, while the emperor - an opponent of the pope - supported the decisions of the chapter. The dispute about the poverty of Christ is only a formal reason, behind which lies intense political intrigue. According to William, “...the question is not whether Christ was poor, but whether the church should be poor. And poverty in relation to the church does not mean whether it owns any good or not. The question is different: does she have the right to dictate her will to earthly rulers?” Mikhail sincerely seeks reconciliation, but Wilhelm from the very beginning does not believe in the success of the meeting, which is later fully confirmed. For the papal delegation, and especially for Bernard Guy (or Guidoni, as the Italians call him), all that was needed was an excuse to confirm the validity of the accusations of heresy against the Minor Franciscans. This occasion becomes the interrogation of cellarer Remigius of Varaginsky and Salvator, who were at one time Dolcinian heretics. William was unable to find the killer, and the French archers, subordinate to Bernard, take control of the monastery (the undetected killer poses a danger to the embassies). Wilhelm and Adson again enter the library, open the system in the chaos of the rooms and find a mirror - the entrance to the “limit of Africa”, where all traces of the book lead - the causes of all crimes. The door did not open, and upon returning to their cells, the heroes witness Bernard Guy’s capture of the “culprits” - the monk Salvator, who was preparing for witchcraft, and the girl who was with Adson. The next day there is a debate between the embassies, as a result Bernard uses Salvator and his fellow cellarer Remigius as a weapon against the Franciscans. Under pressure from the inquisitor, they confirm that they once belonged to the Minorites, and then ended up in the Dolcina sect, which professed similar views on the poverty of Christ as the Minorites and fought against the authorities, then betrayed their sect and ended up, “purified”, in this monastery. It is revealed that Remigius had with him letters from the heretic Dolcin to his supporters, and he asked the librarian Malachi to keep these letters, who, not knowing their contents, hides them in the library and then gives them to Bernard Guy. Under pain of torture, Remigius pleads guilty to the murders that occurred earlier in the monastery, and explains them by his connection with the devil. Thus, it turns out that the Dolcian heretic, a murderer possessed by the devil, has been living in the abbey for many years, and the letters of the heresiarch Dolcian were kept in the library. As a result, the authority of the monastery was undermined and negotiations were interrupted. The sixth and final day arrives, the embassies leave, but before that they witness another mysterious death - the librarian Malachi. William asks for an audience with the Abbot, at the end of which Abbo invites him to leave the monastery by morning. The abbot himself does not appear for vespers, and in the resulting confusion, Wilhelm and Adson return to the library, find the key and penetrate into the “limit of Africa.”

World fire

In the "extremity of Africa" ​​they find the blind man Jorge with the only surviving copy of the second book of Aristotle's Poetics. A dispute ensues, during which the blind man argues for the concealment of this work, and Wilhelm argues for the need to reveal it to the world. Jorge of Burgos saw his main enemy in the book, since it flawlessly proved the need for laughter. (The main argument of the blind man is that Jesus never laughed). The old man tears off a page soaked in poison and begins to eat it, turns off the light (there are no windows in the “limit of Africa”), a chase follows through the book depository, then, in front of Wilhelm and Adson, he “finishes” the volume, snatches the lamp from the heroes and sets fire to the library. It is burning, the entire Temple is taking care of it, the fire spreads to the rest of the buildings. All efforts to extinguish it are in vain. Adson comes to mind with an image from the life of St. Augustine - a boy scooping up the sea with a spoon.

Epilogue

Adson and Wilhelm leave the ashes and soon part ways. Subsequently, already in adulthood, Adson returns to the place where the monastery was, collecting scraps of miraculously preserved pages. Already in old age, at the end of the century, he completes his memories, preparing for a meeting with God.

The book is a demonstration of the scholastic method, which was very popular in the 14th century. Wilhelm shows the power of deductive reasoning.

The solution to the central murder mystery depends on the contents of a mysterious book (Aristotle's book on comedy, the only copy of which survives in the monastery library).