The adventures of julio jurenito. Julio jurenito's extraordinary adventures

Like a lawless comet

In June-July 1921 in Belgium, in the town of La Panne, the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote one of the greatest books of the 20th century, where the title was heard not very hidden hooligan Russian obscenities: "The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his students." This, let's say, Russian do not careimplicated in the Mexican biography of the hero, it seemed, and indeed was the answer to the nightmares of war and revolution that have stunned humanity. At first, the book was perceived as a rather cheerful satire - including on the already strengthened Soviet Russia, of course, and on the bourgeois West, as well-wishers, from Bukharin to Voronsky, who were willing to push the book into the Soviet press. The audience read the book, laughed. High-minded and petty philological criticism took it sharply negatively, since all the laws of the genre were violated, moreover, it seemed (which aesthetes do not like so much in their contemporaries) a serious conversation, and not just about life - about the fate of humanity. How is this possible, they wondered, when all the great books have already been written, there is already the Bible, there is Nietzsche's Zarathustra, there is Marx's Capital. The book asked for this context, but nothing of the kind could be expected from the average poet and funny feuilletonist, especially since he did not pass a good philological school either.

And so Yuri Tynyanov, evaluating the modern literary process, did not regret sarcasms about Ehrenburg: “Ehrenburg is currently busy with the mass production of Western novels. His novel The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito was an extraordinary success. The reader is somewhat tired of the incredible amount of bloodshed in all the stories and stories, of the heroes who think and think. Ehrenburg eased the burden of "seriousness", in the bloodshed it was not blood that flowed, but feuilleton ink, and from the heroes he gutted psychology, stuffing them, however, with a hastily made philosophy. Despite the fact that Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Claudel, Spengler, and generally all and sundry - and perhaps that is why - his hero became lighter than fluff, the hero became sheer irony, entered the philosophical system of Ehrenburg.<…> The result of all this turned out to be somewhat unexpected: the Julio Jurenito extract had a familiar taste - it gave off with Tarzan. "

Especially characteristic is the comparison of Ehrenburg's book with "Tarzan", in which nothing but the desire to humiliate the writer is today impossible to discern. The Opoyaz people did not want to see the true modernity and timeliness of the novel, being busy searching for philological subtleties, analyzing literary life and honest adaptation to the demands of the Soviet government (Viktor Shklovsky, or Nekrylov, as Veniamin Kaverin called him in his novel). In fact, Yevgeny Zamyatin, the author of the great dystopia We, who had a very strong feeling for the era and did not bend before it, answered Tynyanov: “Ehrenburg is perhaps the most modern of all Russian writers, internal and external.<…> There is someone's story about a young mother: she loved her unborn child so much, so wanted to see him as soon as possible, that, without waiting for nine months, she gave birth in six. This happened with Ehrenburg. However, maybe here it is just an instinct for self-preservation: if “Jurenito” had matured, the author would probably not have had the strength to give birth. But even so - with the fontanel not closed on the crown of the head, in some places not yet overgrown with skin - the novel is significant and original in Russian literature.

Perhaps most original of all is that the novel is smart and Jurenito is smart. With few exceptions, Russian literature over the past decades has specialized in fools, idiots, dullards, blissful, and if you tried smart, it did not work out smart. Ehrenburg did it. Other: irony. This is the weapon of the European, few people know it in our country; this is a sword, but we have a club, a whip. "

The irony was like a sword, but the swing was not for a duel. And to fight the whole world. Once Novalis exclaimed that the Bible is still being written and every book that deeply penetrates the essence of the world is part of this book of books. And the opponents, willy-nilly, did not accept precisely this universality of claims, having coincided, paradoxically, with the anti-Semitism of Russian writers of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary years.

Perhaps I'll start with something as serious as Andrei Bely, who also claimed to be a symbolic comprehension of the world, and in the poem "First Date" (also, by the way, written in June 1921), even some prophecies:

Peace - tore in Curie's experiments
Atomic bomb burst
On electronic jets
Unincarnated Hecatomb;
I am the son of the ether, Man, -
I twist from the path of the worldly
With its ethereal porphyry
For the world the world, for the century century.

Note that we will not find a single soil image in these lines. But there are a lot of biblical topics and guesswork, not to mention the orientation towards Western science. It is curious that it was precisely against the lack of soil, against "internationalism" in Russian literature that he wrote a real pogrom article, the meaning of which was essentially reproduced by the Opoyaz people: "The responsiveness of the Jews to questions of art is indisputable; but, equally groundless in all areas of national Aryan art (Russian, French, German), Jews cannot be closely attached to one area; naturally they are equally interested in everything; but this interest cannot be an interest in a true understanding of the tasks of a given national culture, but is an indicator of an instinctive desire for processing, for nationalization (Judaization) of these cultures (and, consequently, for the spiritual enslavement of the Aryans); and the process of this instinctive and completely legitimate absorption of foreign cultures by Jews (by applying their own stamp) is presented to us as a kind of striving for international art. " Tynyanov's passage about the "mass production of Western novels" by Ehrenburg looks like a kind of illustration to this anti-Semitic trick of Bely. What he was ready to afford as a Russian writer, Bely did not want to endure in the work of writers, Jews by blood, not even by culture, precisely because of their worldwide responsiveness, i.e. that trait that so admired Dostoevsky in Pushkin.

Contemporaries who described Ehrenburg in Paris painted a classic portrait of a Jew: “I cannot imagine Montparnasse during the war without the figure of Ehrenburg,” wrote Maximilian Voloshin. - His outward appearance fits perfectly with the general character of spiritual desolation. With a painful, poorly shaven face, with large, overhanging, imperceptibly squinting eyes, heavy Semitic lips, with very long and very straight hair, hanging awkward braids, in a wide-brimmed felt hat, standing erect like a medieval cap, hunched over, with shoulders and legs screwed inside, in a blue jacket sprinkled with dust, dandruff and tobacco ash, looking like a man “who just washed the floor”, Ehrenburg is so “left-sided” and “Montparnasin” that his mere appearance in other quarters of Paris causes confusion and excitement passers-by. " Literary turmoil was caused, as we have seen, and his first novel.

The theme of Jewry is extremely abundant in Russian literature. From the proud and touching lines of Pushkin about Judith, Susanna Turgenev through the monstrous texts of Dostoevsky and Rozanov, the demand for the universal sterilization of Jews (“ emasculation of all Jews") By the famous Orthodox philosopher Florensky to Chekhov's" Rothschild's Violin ", Kuprin's" Gambrinus ", Bunin's stunning cycle" The Shadow of the Bird "about Judea. The same Bunin perfectly understood the role of the Jew in Russian culture as a scapegoat. In "Cursed Days" (1918), he wrote: "Of course, the Bolsheviks are real" workers 'and peasants' power. " She "fulfills the most cherished aspirations of the people." And we already know what the “aspirations” of this “people” are, now called upon to rule the world, the course of all culture, law, honor, conscience, religion, art.<…> The Left blames all the "excesses" of the revolution on the old regime, the Black Hundreds on the Jews. And the people are not to blame! And the people themselves will later blame everything else - on a neighbor and on a Jew. “What am I? Ilya is like me. It was the Jews who knocked us out of this whole thing ... "

The racism of the invective of the Symbolist poet is obvious, for it is difficult to find a racially pure and "full-fledged" French writer (Proust, or what?), Or even more so a Russian, even if Tolstoy attributed Jewish features to Dostoevsky, Bulgarin reproached Pushkin with Arap origin, which, de, did not give he has the opportunity to comprehend the "Russian spirit", not to mention the poets of the early twentieth century - Balmont, Blok, Mandelstam, Pasternak, the great researcher of Russian literature Gershenzon, the philosopher Shestov, Frank and others. Perhaps this anti-Semitism of the great Symbolist expressed the rising spirit of the times. But it is interesting that Bely considered himself a follower of Vl. Solovyov, who before his death prayed for the "Jewish tribe". In the memoirs of S.N. Trubetskoy about the last days and hours of V.S. Solovyov (recorded on the day of his death) tells how, before his death in July 1900, he prayed for the Jewish people: “He prayed both in consciousness and in half-oblivion. Once he said to my wife: “Stop me from falling asleep, make me pray for the Jewish people, I have to pray for them,” and began to read the Psalm out loud in Hebrew. Those who knew Vladimir Sergeevich and his deep love for the Jewish people will understand that these words were not nonsense. "

In The Brief Story of the Antichrist, Soloviev predicted that the 20th century will be a century of great wars, civil strife and coups, described the appearance of the Antichrist, as well as his extermination of the Jews, who, in response to his persecution, gather a multi-million army, defeat the troops of the Antichrist and seize Jerusalem. And then the enemies, writes Soloviev, "saw with amazement that the soul of Israel in its depths lives not by the calculations and desires of Mamon, but by the power of the heart - the hope and anger of its eternal messianic faith." It is the Jews, not Christians, who, according to Solovyov, defeat the Antichrist. The Antichrist, however, manages to escape from the ring of the Jews who surrounded him, after which he gathers an incredible army to fight the Jews. But then an earthquake occurs, under the Dead Sea, not far from which the army of the antichrist is located, the crater of a huge volcano opened, which engulfed the antichrist and his army. Thus came the predicted end of the world, in which with the help of God the Jews destroyed the enemy of the human race. Then there was a unity of all the faithful - Christians and Jews. But until the complete victory over the enemy of the human race, obviously, and Soloviev understood this perfectly well, years of antichrist victories and the preventive destruction of his main enemy - the Jews - must pass.

Having evaluated this prophetic background, we can move on to the theme of Ehrenburg's novel.

Medium

In the same July 1921, when "Jurenito" was created, Ehrenburg wrote verse lines:

I'm not a trumpet player - a trumpet. Blow, Time!
Given to them to believe, to me to ring.
Everyone will hear, but who will appreciate
That even copper can cry?

The position of a medium, a prophet through whom something speaks. What? Future tense? Past? Unclear.

But Time was a trumpet player.
Not me, with a dry and firm hand
Turning over a heavy sheet
Built hordes for the review of centuries
Blind cutters of the earth.

This book is already being written, and is about to come to an end. He puts at the end of the timeline for writing the book: "June-July 1921". In two months to write such a thing - it was as if he was fulfilling some higher task, although he himself called an even shorter period: “I worked from morning till late at night in a small room with a window on the sea. I wrote “Julio Jurenito” in one month, as if writing under dictation. Sometimes my hand got tired, then I went to the sea. "

What did he do? We have already seen the first reactions of Russian readers. The novel was immediately translated in Germany, but even there its problems seemed at first poorly digested themes of Nietzsche. In any case, I have heard such stories from contemporary German philologists. The situation began to change much later. And the point is not in Ehrenburg's amazing journalism of the war years, not in his memoirs, which solved the cultural task - the great task - the rise of the drowned continent of culture. It's just that it's time to put the book in a different row, not even paying attention to other works of the writer. The Germans pair "Julio Jurenito" with "Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann, Russian researchers - with "The Master and Margarita" Micah. Bulgakov, in which the irrational spirit of the 20th century and quite conscious parallels with the eternal book are traced. If we talk about Bulgakov, then the phenomenon of Jurenito is quite comparable to that of Woland, and stylistically, the first acquaintance of the author-storyteller and at the same time the hero reminds the acquaintance of the writer Maksudov with the publisher Rudolfi, whom he at first takes for the devil.

Ehrenburg understood that his book was not that untimely, as Gorky called his writings, imitating Nietzsche, it was simply from a different category, from a different spiritual series. I remember talking to a budding critic in my first year at university and telling him that I liked Jurenito. “I also once liked it,” he answered importantly, “but this is not literature. Literature is Chekhov, Yuri Kazakov, maybe Rasputin. " At first I was offended for Ehrenburg. Then I agreed. This is really not literature. But in the same sense in which the literature “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann, “The Poem about the Grand Inquisitor” by Dostoevsky, “Three Conversations” by Vl. Solovyov. What is this if not a novel? Let's just call this work a book. This is not at all small, if not too high. However, this is how Ehrenburg himself called his text in one of the poems of the same year:

To whom will I betray the insights of this book?
My century among the growing waters
He won't see the land too close,
He will not understand the olive branch.
A jealous morning rises over the world.
And these years are not multilingual,
But only the labor of a bloody midwife,
Who came to cut off the child from the mother.
May it be so! From these days of no love
I throw a melodious bridge for centuries.

This is January or February 1921. So he himself marks the poem. The book has not been written yet. But it's all in the head. And even when he began to write, it was as if he did not write himself. He recalled: “I could not write. There are many unnecessary episodes in the book, it is not planed, and clumsy turns are encountered every now and then. But I love this book. " He could not help but love her, because he did not create her himself, but was only a mediator, a medium of higher powers, behind which he could hardly keep up with writing. To whom did you pass it on? I didn't know myself. He lived a long life, and new generations did not even know about the existence of this book: “For young readers, I, as a writer, was born during the Second World War,” he complained in his memoirs. - About “Jurenito” we remember preferably pensioners, but he is dear to me: in it I expressed a lot of things that determined not only my literary path, but also my life. Of course, this book contains many absurd judgments and naive paradoxes; I tried to see the future all the time; I saw one thing and made a mistake in the other. But in general, this is a book that I do not refuse. " He, of course, was jolly and cunning, but he really wanted to bring the forbidden text back to life, he referred to the fact that Lenin had read the book (judging by the memoirs of Krupskaya) and he liked it. So, resorting to various evasions, Ehrenburg still managed to republish it during his lifetime, however, sacrificing the chapter on Lenin as the Grand Inquisitor. That gave the reason for subsequent readers-truth-lovers to look for this particular chapter, to make it representative of the entire text. Even Ben in love with Ehrenburg. It is through this chapter that Sarnov reads Jurenito. It seems that the questions raised there are more serious. I would say metaphysical. It is unlikely that the unknown force that led the hand of Ehrenburg was concerned only with denouncing the leader of the world proletariat.

No god, no damn thing

Dostoevsky argued more than once that one can believe in the devil without believing in God. Both Stavrogin and Ivan Karamazov are talking about this. Then Nietzsche announced that God was dead. But this pleased him, since the empty place was to be taken by a superman, or, more precisely, that Nietzsche himself, the antichrist, did not hide. However, as Martin Heidegger convincingly managed to prove, the death of God does not mean at all that someone will be able to take this vacant position. Nothing of the kind, and all the horror of the new world that there is no God in it, and therefore no one knows how to live. Not only moral guidelines have been lost, but also a certain spiritual space that led a person out of the animal state. Therefore, the jubilation of the French and subsequent materialists about how great it is to live on a godless land, obviously, turned out to be somewhat premature. The First World War, then the revolution in Russia showed this. What then happens to the world? It must be said that the new circumstance (“the absence of God,” as Heidegger put it) was not immediately comprehended, because the priests served the warring parties, the Bolsheviks shot priests, fighting the Church as an essential enemy. And the horror was that there were only masks, behind which there was a void, for a while filled with infernal energies.

Everyone in Russia was waiting for the devil, they wrote about this more than once, especially Bulgakov, who painted Soviet Russia as a diocese of the devil. All this is a traditional Christian, or even Manichean, scheme: good and evil. Ehrenburg offers something completely different: nothingness, nothing. This was taken as a joke, which was based on the ironic text of the novel-treatise. But Ehrenburg shows the relativity of the entire system of values \u200b\u200b- both old and new. He, like Einstein, looked at the world from the point of view of another universe.

“I was expecting a quick reprisal, ridicule, maybe traditional claws, or maybe more simply, an imperative invitation to follow him in a taxi. But the tormentor displayed rare restraint. He sat down at a nearby table and, without looking at me, opened the evening paper. Finally, turning to me, he opened his mouth. I wake up. But then something completely unimaginable followed. Quietly, even lazily somehow, he called the waiter: "A glass of beer!" - and a minute later a narrow glass was foaming on his table. The devil drinks beer! This I could not bear, and politely, but at the same time excitedly, said to him: “You are waiting in vain. I'm ready. At your service. Here is my passport, a book of poetry, two photographs, body and soul. We will obviously go in the car? .. ”I repeat, I tried to speak calmly and businesslike, as if it was not about my end, for I immediately noted that my feature of temperament was phlegmatic.

Now, remembering this distant evening, which was my way to Damascus, I bow before the clairvoyance of the Teacher. In response to my obscure speeches, Julio Jurenito was not at a loss, did not call the waiter, did not leave, - no, quietly, looking into my eyes, he said: “I know who you take me for. But he is not. " These words, which did not differ too much from the usual instructions of the doctor who treated me for nervous diseases, nevertheless seemed to me revelation (emphasis mine - VC.) - wondrous and vile. My whole slender building was crumbling, for outside the line both Rotunda and I and the good that existed somewhere were unthinkable ”(223).

Ehrenburg describes himself as weak, petty, etc., he draws his hero through his biography. It doesn't matter what kind of Jew it is, what matters is that it is Jewish. He is both the author and the hero, that is essential. Because among the seven students of Jurenito there are all people of different cultural and national mentality: German, French, Italian, Russian, rather abstract Negro, American and Jew. Except for a Jew, everyone is quite conventional and literary, although bright and impressive. But you understand that all of them are not seen from the inside. The image of a Jew could look even more doubtful, there are too many connotations associated with it. However, the biography of the hero makes this image quite believable and artistically more alive than other characters. This was noted by Zamyatin, as always succinctly, but precisely: "In" Jurenito "- a very successful method of introducing the author into the number of characters."

Only the Jew Ehrenburg understands that he comes into contact with the Teacher, penetrating with his mind through time and space, only he calls himself a student: for Mr. Coole he is a guide, for Monsieur Dele a companion, for Ercole Bambuchi Jurenito a rich man who hired Ercole as a guide, and etc. And only the Jew Ehrenburg calls himself a Disciple: "I will be your disciple, faithful and diligent" (226). It is given to him to see the highest meaning. So the twelve Galilean fishermen suddenly called themselves disciples of the One whom the crowd laughed at, sensing his non-peace. But Jurenito is different. The Teacher thought for centuries, nations, not today or tomorrow, but did not at all consider himself the Savior. He did not consider it, because the upper floor of the universe seemed to him empty, otherwise this world would not have been so meaningless.

We all remember the terrible accusations brought against God by Job, then repeated by Ivan Karamazov. Jurenito was depressed by the senselessness of all world events, they could be monstrous, terrible, ridiculous and absurd, the leapfrog of wars and revolutions, but he did not see the highest meaning in them. He came to testify about the disappearance of the transcendental principle in the world. This is still something other than Nietzsche's statement that God is dead. There was no God, but the world is full of illusions, beliefs, ideologies with which mankind is shielded from the horror of life in order to somehow embrace its piece of the universe. But the fact is that this comfort is sometimes fraught with world horror.

Let's not forget that the coming century was called a century ideocracieswho structured totalitarian systems, defining the value orientations of new despotisms. Is theology possible after Auschwitz? - Western thinkers and theologians asked the question. There were answers, but Ivan Karamazov's questions remained unanswered. Moreover, they were poetically amplified. To the horror of World War II, there was a curse on God's world from the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva.

Oh black mountain
Eclipsed - the whole world!
It's time - it's time - it's time
Return the ticket to the creator.

…………………………..
To your crazy world
There is only one answer - refusal.
(March 15 - May 11, 1939)

Ehrenburg tried to oppose this world with a different understanding - the tragic exclusion of ideas and ideologies for which there is no need to die, all the more there is no need to blame God for what he did not do. In fact, Ehrenburg offered an amazing theodicy, justifying God by saying that he does not exist. As I already mentioned, Ehrenburg was charged with following Nietzsche by both German and Russian literary critics. It would seem that Heidegger showed the futility of the superman's attempts to take the place of God, but "Jurenito" is still stubbornly trying to pair with "Zarathustra". Although, unlike the vaguely designated listeners of Zarathustra, Jurenito's students represent completely different cultures, even races. And this is very important for Ehrenburg - to represent all cultures in one system and laugh at their imaginary contradictions, which sometimes lead to serious bloodshed. Only the sacred meaning in this he does not seek, on the contrary, sadly ironic. And then we will see that Ehrenburg fully continues the biblical tradition of accepting the stranger. In the book of Leviticus, for example, favor with strangers is commanded: “When a stranger settles in your land, do not oppress him. The stranger who has taken up residence with you, let it be to you the same as your native; love him as you love yourself; for you also were strangers in the land of Egypt "( Leo 19: 33–34). It is not yet about love for enemies, but about love for non-tribesmen, strangers who become neighbors or household members.

The idea of \u200b\u200bimitating Ehrenburg Nietzsche returned to Russian thought in the paradoxical essay of Boris Paramonov, a postmodern publicist from the third wave of emigrants: “Nietzsche. We have already said that Zarathustra can be considered the literary ancestor of Jurenito: the very type of the paradoxical sage is taken, there is no novel outside of Jurenito's monologues, it comes down to them. "

Obviously, you can look for ancestors even further: these are the sages and prophets of the Bible (both the Old and New Testaments), the travesty imitation of which is the whole of Nietzsche, unable to get out of the biblical paradigm even in his Antichrist, where it is the Jews who are accused of having overcome in Christianity, the culture of other nations. However, it is clear even without Nietzsche that Christianity is a supranational idea. And we see in the novel how each of Jurenito's disciples holds on to their national values, defending them to the point of bloodshed, with the exception of the Jew Ehrenburg. It is no coincidence that long before Stalin the Russian philosopher Vasily Rozanov named the Jews cosmopolitans ... But if we look even further, we will understand that this self-name of the Cynics (Diogenes), coming from Ancient Greece, was very willingly applied to themselves by the early Christians.

Strictly speaking, the Teacher in Ehrenburg's novel is not that against God, he simply states the absence of this idea in contemporary European culture. Jurenito himself, meanwhile - and here I see one of the mysteries of the novel - quite lives in a transcendental dimension. It is into this dimension that the hero of the novel, the Jew Ehrenburg, stretches.

Predictions, they are also a historical statement

The extermination of Jews during the revolution and the Civil War took on monstrous proportions in Russia, Ukraine, Poland. These facts, historical, statistical, etc., the number is incredible. I will cite a few lines from a work of fiction written, of course, by a Jew, but by a Jew who went through the entire Civil War and wrote another biblical book about the life of Jews in the Diaspora. I mean Isaac Babel.

In the story "Zamoć" from "Cavalry", a good-natured Red Army man talks to the narrator on a terrible night, when the groans of Jews murdered by Poles can be heard from afar: "A man made me light a cigarette from his fire.

The Jew is to blame for everyone, ”he said,“ for ours and yours. The smallest number of them will remain after the war. How many Jews are considered in the world?

Ten million, - I replied and began to bridle the horse.

There will be two hundred thousand of them! - cried the man and touched my hand, fearing that I would leave. But I got on the saddle and galloped to the place where the headquarters was. "

In Soviet Russia, they hoped that headquarters will save. But the cultured West? Nothing of the kind could have been there. The bonfires of the Inquisition, the expulsion of the Jews from England and Spain seemed so distant past! This was practically a universal conviction: the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", written in Russia, anti-Semitic books and magazines in Germany, published, as a rule, by immigrants from Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, even the Dreyfus case, condemned by all Western intellectuals, looked like an annoying accident, without which cannot do in the era of liberalism and freedom of speech. Banning them would violate the basic principle of European freedom.

And suddenly Jurenito makes a strange experiment. The situation is described in a primitively simple way:

“Talking peacefully, we were waiting for the Teacher, who was having dinner with some large quartermaster. Soon he came and, hiding in a small safe a sheaf of documents, crumpled in his pocket, he told us cheerfully:

“I did a good job today. Things are going well. Now you can relax and chat a little. Only earlier, so as not to forget, I will prepare the text of the invitations, and you, Alexey Spiridonovich, will take them to the printing house "Union" tomorrow.

Five minutes later, he showed us the following:

In the near future,
solemn sessions

destruction of the Jewish tribe
in Budapest, Kiev, Jaffa, Algeria
and in many other places.

The program will include, in addition to the beloved dear
public of traditional pogroms, restored in the spirit
epochs: burning Jews, burying them alive in the ground,spraying fields with Jewish blood, as well as new
techniques of "evacuation", "cleaning from suspicious
elements ", etc., etc.

Are invited
cardinals, bishops, archimandrites, English lords,
romanian boyars, Russian liberals, French
journalists, members of the Hohenzollern family, Greeks
without distinction of rank and all comers.
The place and time will be announced separately.

The entrance is free.

"Teacher! - Alexey Spiridonovich exclaimed in horror. - This is inconceivable! Twentieth century, and such an abomination! How can I refer this to Union — I, who read Merezhkovsky? ”” (P. 296).

Then the Teacher recites a long list of historical events that led to the total extermination of the Jews. He accompanies the description of each of the events with a mocking irony addressed to the then liberals and humanists. I’ll give you one at random: “In southern Italy, during earthquakes, they first fled to the north, then cautiously, in single file, walked back to see if the earth was still shaking. The Jews also fled and also returned home, behind everyone. Of course, the earth was shaking either because the Jews wanted it, or because the earth did not want the Jews. In both cases, it was useful to bury individual members of this tribe alive, which was done. What did the advanced people say? .. Oh, yes, they were very afraid that the buried would finally shake the earth. " Each time, this destruction contributed to the rallying of a certain national tribe and the strengthening of the despotic rule in it, which grew up in the struggle against the "common enemy - the Jew." It is no coincidence that Hannah Arendt insists in her major study on totalitarianism that anti-Semitism is the forerunner of totalitarianism.

Why are Jews alien to the world?

As you can see, Nietzsche is talking about overcoming nothingness into which the Jews were trying to drive other nations, and about the victory of the Jews in this struggle. Ehrenburg is still talking about something else. Why the Jews were able to overcome these private and local cultures. For both Christianity and Marxism, according to the logic of Ehrenburg, have a common root in Jewry. And it can hardly be called a provocation to bring every idea to the logical end - a technique that Jurenito constantly resorts to. And in this he is a complete ally of his student Ehrenburg.

“Teacher,” Alexei Spiridonovich objected, “aren't the Jews the same people as we are?”

(While Jurenito was doing his "excursion", Tishin sighed long and wiped his eyes with a handkerchief, but just in case he moved away from me.)

"Of course not! A soccer ball and a bomb are the same thing? Or, in your opinion, the tree and the ax can be brothers? You can love or hate Jews, look at them with horror as arsonists, or with hope as saviors, but their blood is not yours and their business is not yours. Do not understand? Don't wanna believe? Okay, I'll try to explain it to you more intelligibly. The evening is quiet, not hot, over a glass of this light vuvray I will keep you busy with a child's play. Tell me, my friends, if you were asked to leave one word out of the entire human language, namely “yes” or “no,” and abolish the rest, which one would you prefer? ”(P. 298).

There is a well-known opinion that a Jew "will always be comfortable in life." Moreover, it is precisely the subjugation of the world for themselves and their convenience that is supposedly the essential task of the Jews, therefore, they are so scattered, like the Eternal Jews, all over the world, in order to master them for their fellow tribesmen. In the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", which appeared in Russia at the beginning of the century, the most important topic, more precisely the legend, about the great Jewish conspiracy to conquer world domination should be highlighted. The topic is old, an old legend, but very actualized precisely at the beginning of the twentieth century - the century of the creation of powerful totalitarian structures that not only claimed, but tried in practice, in reality, to realize their claims to world domination. Hannah Arendt, for example, wrote about this, referring to Bolshevik and Nazi sources: “Totalitarian governments strive for global conquest and subordination of all peoples of the earth to their domination.<…> The decisive factor here is that totalitarian regimes really build their foreign policy on the basis of the consistent premise that they will eventually achieve their ultimate goal. " One of the arguments of totalitarianism is opposition to the world Jewish conspiracy. Ehrenburg accepts the idea that jews against the world, but gives it a completely different - metaphysical - interpretation. It is interesting that totalitarian regimes, like Jurenito, believe that there is no God, but therefore they erect the Tower of Babel, the kingdom of the Grand Inquisitor, forcing all people to bless the world around them.

When all of Jurenito's disciples accepted "yes" as the basis of their understanding of the world, the cowardly Jew Ehrenburg utters something completely unexpected. I would like to cite this episode almost completely:

""Why are you silent?" - the Teacher asked me. I didn’t answer earlier, afraid to annoy him and my friends. “Master, I will not lie to you - I would leave no.<…> Of course, as my great-great-great-grandfather, clever Solomon said: "It's time to collect stones and time to throw them." But I'm a simple person, I have one face, not two. Probably someone will have to collect, maybe Schmidt. In the meantime, I, by no means out of originality, but in good conscience, must say: “Destroy the yes, destroy everything in the world, and then by itself there will be only one“ no ”!”

While I was talking, all the friends who were sitting next to me on the couch moved to another corner. I was left alone. The teacher turned to Alexei Spiridonovich:

“Now you see that I was right. There was a natural separation. Our Jew was left alone. You can destroy all the ghettos, erase all the traits of settled life, tear down all boundaries, but nothing can fill these five arshins separating you from it. We are all Robinsons, or, if you like, convicts, further a matter of character. One tames a spider, practices Sanskrit and lovingly sweeps the floor of the cell. Another hits the wall with his head - a bump, again a bang - again a bump, and so on; which is stronger - a head or a wall? The Greeks came, looked around - maybe there are better apartments, no disease, no death, no pain, for example Olympus. But nothing can be done - you have to get settled in this one. And to be in a good mood, it is best to declare various inconveniences - including death (which cannot be changed anyway) - the greatest blessings. The Jews came - and immediately into the wall boo! “Why is it so arranged? Here are two people, to be equal to them. But no: Jacob is in favor, and Esau is in the backyard. Undermining of the earth and sky, Jehovah and kings, Babylon and Rome begins. The ragamuffins sleeping on the steps of the temple - the Essenes are working: like an explosive in cauldrons, kneading a new religion of justice and poverty. Now the indestructible Rome will fly! And beggars, ignorant, stupid sectarians come out against the splendor, against the wisdom of the ancient world. Rome trembles. The Jew Paul defeated Marcus Aurelius! ""

Let us interrupt Jurenito's speech for a moment. He expresses the idea that many writers and philosophers are trying to formulate in one way or another: why the Jews overcome the temporal limitations of all those cultures with which they had to deal, experience them. Why are they always among those dissatisfied with the existing order of the world? A genetic memory of paradise? May be. Therefore, they strive to convince other peoples that there is no need to deify this moment. I will refer to a wonderful thinker who wrote quite independently of Ehrenburg: “The Jews, by their very existence, protect the peoples from a relapse of soothing self-adoration.<…> Performing such a function for thousands of years may seem like a breeze.<…> But this is exactly what Jews do all the time. They exist and by their existence remind non-Jews of their inferiority, of the incompleteness of their journey. " The fact is that this overcoming of historical limitations is both a weakness and a strength of the Jewish tribe. Therefore, it is so opposite, in fact, incapable of completely surrendering to any political idea. Philosophical - of course, but not political. The Trotsky are always the losers to the Stalins, because, according to the thought of the just mentioned thinker, the ruler who gives his name to a moment in history must be completely absorbed in this moment. He must dive into the waves of this moment and become indistinguishable from it stronger than any other person. For the designation of the era is the business of the ruler, and he appears on the stamps or coins of his country. Government, insofar as it personifies the epoch, is always opposite to the deeds of Eternity. The Jew is incapable of this. I will continue to quote Rosenstock-Hussi: “The pagan leader is the servant of the times. A Jew can never “believe” in Time, he believes in Eternity. "

Let's continue reading Jurenito's speech, which shows the reason why people, as a rule, strive to live in time and not in eternity: “But ordinary people, who prefer a cozy house to dynamite, begin to settle in a new faith, settle down in this bare hut in an amicable way , at home. Christianity is no longer a battering machine, but a new fortress; terrible, naked, destructive justice is replaced by human, comfortable, gutta-percha mercy. Rome and the world stood firm. But, seeing this, the Jewish tribe disowned their young and began to dig again. Even somewhere in Melbourne he is now sitting alone and quietly digging in his thoughts. And again they are kneading something in the cauldrons, and again they are preparing a new faith, a new truth. And forty years ago, the gardens of Versailles were getting the first fits of fever, just like the gardens of Hadrian. And Rome boasts of wisdom, Seneca's books are written, brave cohorts are ready. He trembles again, "unbreakable Rome"!

The Jews were carrying a new baby. You will see his wild eyes, red hair and strong hands as steel. Having given birth, the Jews are ready to die. A heroic gesture - "there are no more peoples, there are no more us, but we are all!" Oh, naive, incorrigible sectarians! Your child will be taken, washed, dressed - and he will be just like Schmidt. They will again say - "justice", but replace it with expediency. And will you leave again to hate and wait, break the wall and moan “how long”?

I will answer - until the days of your madness and ours, until the days of infancy, until the distant days. In the meantime, this tribe will be doused with the blood of a woman in labor in the squares of Europe, giving birth to another child who will betray him.

But how can I not love this spade in my millennial hand? They dig graves for them, but are they not digging up a field for them? Jewish blood will be shed, the invited guests will applaud, but according to ancient whispers it will poison the earth more bitterly. The great medicine of the world! .. "

And, coming up to me, the Teacher kissed my forehead. "

A little later, the Teacher kisses the Grand Inquisitor - Lenin, explaining his action by imitating the similar actions of the heroes of Russian novels. The kiss with which he kisses the Jew of Ehrenburg means only one thing: their spiritual kinship, full acceptance by the mysterious Mexican of the pathos of Jewry.

Jurenito's phrases can be reduced to all known Philosemitic platitudes, but here these platitudes are overcome by an extremely powerful idea, which I would like to discuss.

"No" as a step towards transcendence

This is something other than Karamaz's rejection of the world. “I need retribution ... and retribution not in infinity somewhere and sometime, but here, already on earth, and so that I can see it myself. I believed, I want to see myself ... I want to see with my own eyes how the doe will lie down next to the lion and how the slaughtered one will get up and embrace the one who killed him. I want to be here when everyone suddenly finds out why everything was like this. All religions on earth are based on this desire, and I believe. " Ivan Karamazov demands the fulfillment of all eschatological aspirations in this world, which is why he has a project of a theocracy that gives worldly life under the authority of the Church, even if it has forgotten about God, but wipes away every tear of a child. Some kind of afterlife retribution is not enough for Ivan, he wants harmony and happiness for all people already here on earth.

Since there is no harmony, he returns his ticket to God. Ehrenburg says something quite different. Ivan does not accept the earthly world, because evil reigns in it. Ehrenburg does not accept this world, even if it is prosperous, simply for the fact that it is devoid of the highest meaning, for the national egoism of every people who settled on Earth, for being satisfied with themselves and cannot approach themselves with the word "no." Of course, each nation has internalized its dose of Christian truth, or what it considers to be such. And even fulfills the necessary commandments to the best of human strength. But we are not, we are all! Jewishness, despite the nationalism of Judaism, endlessly gives rise to supranational ideologies, for the God originally born by them was understood by them as the God of all peoples. This is a people that deny the tribal gods, but create a common God, who has his kingdom in another world. It is this circumstance that gives the Jews the basis for counter-resistance to the world of their day. And their chosenness by God means only a terrible responsibility before God, who is harsh towards the chosen ones (the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah), but also the hatred of other peoples who are devoted to the moment, and therefore hate the Jews for their existence in Eternity. Being in Eternity, despite the constant destruction of this tribe in each specific historical period of time. Marina Tsvetaeva saw this brilliant property of the Jewish tribe, perhaps not without the influence of the Ehrenburg book.

"Poem of the End", 12 chap.

Behind the city! Do you understand? Per!
Out! Shaft crossed.
Life is a place where you can't live:
Ev- Reisky quarter.

So not worth a hundred times
Become the Eternal Jew?
For everyone who is not a reptile
Ev- Reisk pogrom-

A life. Only in the cross is alive!
Judas faith!
To the leper islands!
In hell! Everywhere! But not in

Life - only endures crossings, only
Sheep to the executioner!
Right-to-reside your list
But- gami trample!

I'm trampling on! For David's shield -
Revenge! - In a mess of bodies!
Is it delightful that a Jew
Live- didn't want to ?!

The ghetto of the chosen ones! Shaft and moat:
By- do not wait for mercy!
In this most Christian of the worlds
Poets- Jews!

1924 (Prague)

This is the level to which the chosen ones of all peoples ascend. This is what Marina Tsvetaeva's lines are about, which are marked with the year of death of Franz Kafka, who also saw, ahead of time, the onset of “the absence of God” and the horror of the impersonality that was coming on the world, claiming to replace God. Life in this world is the path of "crossings", that is, abandoned human freedom to adapt to the world. The path of the poet is also "no" to the modern world, it is the path to destruction, therefore poets are "Jews". For rejection of the modern world, hidden under humiliated smiles, greasy lapserdaks, the world, feeling this Jewish contempt for this world, hates it so much, builds a ghetto, which then destroys, spreading myths about the desire of Jews to seize power over the universe. But in reality it is different - it is a rejection of "Euclidean geometry".

In my novel "The Fortress" (Chapter 7), the hero discusses this topic. I will cite these considerations, so as not to retell and not multiply the essence, but we will write off some possible inaccuracy on the fact that the work is artistic, not scientific:

“- The historical paradox is that the people who gave the world Christianity, brought the ideas of humanism into the world, again gave people equal in strength and passion to the biblical prophets and evangelical apostles, who were among the destroyers of Christianity. But this paradox, maybe not even historical, but mystical, and so far incomprehensible to us. Do you remember that Ivan Karamazov said that with his Euclidean mind, he is not able to understand the non-Euclidean logic and wisdom of Scripture? ..

I.e? - it is clear that trying to understand, asked Lina.

I mean that this tribe, I don't know, chosen by God or the Devil, or maybe aliens, maybe they themselves are aliens, works on transcendental ideas, drags humanity with it from the peaceful comfort of a half-animal life, or even directly from cannibalism, barbaric - to the rarefied heights of the spirit, where a person becomes a person, free and independent. And they, the representatives of this tribe, drew, drew all of humanity into their spiritual strife. The disputes between Kantians and Hegelians never took on such acuteness as between Christians, Marxists, Freudians, Trotskyists, Leninists ... As if they were not arguing about ideas, but about the very essence of life, and they paid with life for these ideas. "

In an episode of the conversation that was not included in this edition, the hero notes: “If I mention the name of another genius Jew - Albert Einstein, who also overcame Newton's earthly physics, then we have two points, or even three, if we recall the Bible, which allow us to draw a straight line the line on which the creations of the Jewish sages are immediately located, their number allows you to catch a certain pattern. " This straight line can be expressed by this word "no" in relation to the earthly world. Ehrenburg's "no" seems to be close to the return of the ticket to God from Ivan Karamazov, but in fact it is different. I repeat: this “no” also rejects a well-ordered world order if it is devoid of transcendental spirituality.

And, I must say, this "no", addressed to the Euclidean geometry of the arrangement of one's own home, is based on the classic episodes of Jewish history. Everyone can take their own starting point. I take the Exodus from Egypt as such a point. At some point, “the entire congregation of the sons of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness, and the children of Israel said to them: oh, if we died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the cauldrons of meat, when we ate bread to our fill ! " ( Ex 16, 2-3). Then there was a murmur about thirst, then they built a golden calf in general, without seeing Moses ascending Mount Sinai. The Jews had to lead the desert for forty years until they forgot about the charm of earthly slavery. It was "no" to the bondage of this life of Moses, which he taught his people. And then the prophets denounced their fellow tribesmen when they were mired in the debauchery of this life, in pagan instincts. The first is Elijah in the 10th century BC, who opposed the government, against the king Jeroboam, who indulged the people. Prophets as messengers of the Kingdom of God were more than once stoned to death by those whose lives they said "no." Until they achieved from their people, as Soloviev said, moral homogeneity with God. “Having separated from paganism and having risen by their faith above Chaldean magic and Egyptian wisdom, the founders and leaders of the Jews became worthy of divine election. God chose them, revealed himself to them, made an alliance with them. The treaty of alliance or covenant of God with Israel is the focus of the Jewish religion. The phenomenon is the only one in world history, for in no other people religion did it accept this form of union or covenant between God and man, as two beings, although unequal, but morally homogeneous". It was this state of mind that allowed the hero-narrator, the character of the novel, the Jew Ehrenburg, in the world that God left, to repeat the feat of his fellow tribesmen, to say "no" to this world. Moreover, to say it with desperate courage, or, if you like, with the courage of despair.

This courage was not appreciated then, and did not understand. The author himself did not understand.

Of course, precisely because Ehrenburg said “no” to the impending world, he could not take it seriously, he could play along with him, etc. It is this musical part that Julio Jurenito plays, putting into practice Ehrenburg's “no” in his mockery of everyone historical forms, born of the twentieth century. Ehrenburg himself perfectly understood his subsequent rejection of himself, and for an understanding reader he wrote a story during the war, seemingly with a discourse on the resilience of the common people, but in fact - about his fate. Writer Dadaev in the story "Glory" from the collection "Stories of these Years" in 1944, he feels less than the famous soldier Lukashov, who doesn't want glory, and the writer Dadaev does everything for his glory: “He was gifted, wrote entertainingly, wrote what was demanded of him - not from servility, but from deep indifference, which was hidden behind hot speeches and reckless actions.<…> Glory was at stake. " In other words, "yes" is indifference to the world, disinterest in its affairs, and fame is the thought of oneself, that is, vanity. For a person who once chose "no", fame is a symbol of the earthly and transitory. The hero-writer, through whose eyes the war is shown, is not condemned at all: he personally dared, is on the front line, shoots from a machine gun at the Nazis, etc. But this double "yes" of his last name said a lot to the prospective readers of his first and great book.

It was a late longing for his real courage, not everyday, not personal, not military, but metaphysical, which is most important in the alignment of human meanings. The meaning of "Jurenito" was damaged by subsequent novels, too simple, too topical, without going into transcendence. In their context, “Julio Jurenito” was also evaluated, which began to be perceived as just a satirical story about modernity. A little later, they saw fulfilled prophecies - about the Holocaust, about Nazism, about the bombing of Japan by the Americans. So, the writer is like a prophet of the twentieth century. As Sergei Zemlyanoy wittily noted, “the initials of the main character of the book are Kh.Kh. - this is a consciously or unconsciously encoded designation of the twentieth century. " When I read this remark to my daughter (then a third-year student of the philological faculty of the Russian State University for the Humanities), she said that these two letters can be read as two X's, i.e. double unknown. You can also see the first letters of the word "ha-ha" in these initials. So, the unknown XX century squared, about which the writer spoke with laughter, in the form of ironically written prophecies, which, indeed, for the most part came true.

But the metaphysical meaning of Ehrenburg's "no" as the semantic basis of Jewish fate and a factor in the self-movement of mankind in this world was not appreciated. To show this meaning was the task of my text.

December 2005

Notes

1. Tynyanov Yu.N. Literary today // Tynyanov Yu.N. Poetics. Literary history. Movie. Moscow: Nauka, 1977. P. 153–154.

2. Zamyatin E.New Russian prose // Zamyatin E... I'm afraid. Literary criticism. Journalism. Memories. M .: Heritage, 1999.S. 92.

3. A. Stamped culture // Empire and nation in Russian thought of the early twentieth century / Compilation, entry. article and note. CM. Sergeev. M .: Skimen; Prensa, 2004. S. 339. It must be said that the perception of the Jews as a kind of international force was quite characteristic of the national consciousness. In Plato's novel "Chevengur," the watchmen ask two popular communist revolutionaries, Kopenkin and Dvanov, who they are. “We are international!” - Kopenkin recalled the title of Rosa Luxemburg: International Revolutionary. " This is followed by another question: "Jews, who are they?" To which - no less characteristic answer: "Kopenkin coolly drew his saber<…>: "I will finish you on the spot for such a word." (115). In a sense, this is Platonov's answer.

5. See: Hagemeister M. The New Middle Ages of Pavel Florensky // Research on the History of Russian Thought. Yearbook- M .: Modest Kolerov, 2004.S. 104.

6. Bunin I. Cursed days. M., 1990.S. 96.

7. Trubetskoy S.N. The death of V.S. Solovyov. July 31, 1900 // Soloviev V.S.... "Only the sun of love is immovable ..." Poems. Prose. Letters. Memoirs of Contemporaries. M .: Moscow worker, 1990.S. 384.

8. V.S. Soloviev Three conversations // V.S. Soloviev Coll. op. in 10 t. T. 10. SPb, b.y. P. 219–

9. Ehrenburg I. People, years, life. Memoirs in 3 volumes.T.M .: Soviet writer, 1990. S. 377.

10. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, which describes the appearance of Julio Jurenito: “The door of the cafe opened, and a very ordinary gentleman in a bowler hat and a gray rubber cloak entered slowly.<…> The gentleman in the bowler hat was such a curiosity that the whole Rotunda wavered, fell silent for a minute, and then burst out in a whisper of surprise and alarm. Only I comprehended everything at once. Indeed, it was worth taking a close look at the alien in order to understand the quite definite purpose of both the mysterious bowler hat and the wide gray cloak. Above the temples under the curls, steep horns clearly stood out, and the cloak tried in vain to cover the sharp, belligerently raised tail "( Ehrenburg I... The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his students // Ehrenburg I... Coll. op. In 8 volumes. T. M .: Art. lit., 1990. S. 222. In the future, all references to the text of the novel are given in this edition). In approximately the same way in the "Notes of a Dead Man (Theatrical Novel)", as I have already mentioned, the publisher Rudolfi comes to the writer Maksudov, who takes the alien for the devil.

11. It is worth referring to a modern Hungarian researcher, who quite sharply defined the novel as a rigid calculation with all the values \u200b\u200bof European culture: “The novel“ Julio Jurenito ”(1921) was the first of many and remains the best of all the writer's novels. It was born of the European post-war atmosphere and became the quint of the disillusionment of the turn of the century. All the positive ideals of humanity are methodically and irresistibly revised in the Teacher's statements or in the plot points. It is shown how faith, hope and love, science, law and art, equally false, lead to collapse "( Heteny J. Encyclopedia of Denial: Julio Jurenito Ilya Ehrenburg // Studia Slavica Hung. 2000.45 No. 3-4. P. 317).

12. Ehrenburg I. People, years, life. Memoirs in 3 volumes.Vol. 1.P. 377.

13. Ibid. P. 378.

14. See: Sarnov B... Ehrenburg's case. M .: Text, 2004. S. 52–67.

15. Zamyatin E.New Russian prose. P. 93.

16. Paramonov B... Portrait of a Jew // Paramonov B... End of style. SPb .; M .: Agraf, 1999.S. 406.

17. In the article of 1909: "The Jews, of course, did not become Russians, but became cosmopolitans in a Russian frock coat and in a Russian position" ( V.V. Rozanov Belarusians, Lithuanians and Poland in the borderline issue of Russia // Empire and nation in Russian thought of the early twentieth century / Compilation, entry. article and note. CM. Sergeev. M .: Skimen; Prensa, 2004, p. 128).

18. Paramonov B... Portrait of a Jew. P. 406.

19. Nietzsche F... Op. in 2 volumes. T. M .: Mysl ', 1990. P. 649–650.

20. Here, like an illustration to the words of Simon Dubnov, who understood Judophobia not as hatred, but as fear other Jewish peoples: “The word“ Judophobia ”, usually understood in the sense of hatred of Jews, means in reality fear before the Jews. Fobos in Greek means fear, fear, and fobeo - I'm afraid or afraid, I'm afraid. Thus, “Judophobia” means Judaism ”( Dubnov S.M. Reflections // Dubnov S.M. The book of life. Materials for the history of my time. Memories and Reflections. Jerusalem; M .: Gesharim, Bridges of culture, 2004. S. 618).

21. Arendt H. The origins of totalitarianism. M .: TsentrKom, 1996.S. 540.

22. Rosenstock-Hussi O. Great revolutions. Autobiography of a Western Man (USA). Hermitage Publishers, p. 184.

23. It is worth citing the opinion of one of the leaders of the “moment” and the “natural order” of things, I mean Hitler: “A Jew is a catalyst that ignites flammable substances. The people among whom there are no Jews will certainly return to the natural world order "( Picker G... Table conversations with Hitler. Smolensk: Rusich, 1993.S. 80).

24. Rosenstock-Hussi O. Great revolutions. P. 186.

25. “In the ancient history of Judaism, two periods are established: a) pre-prophetic, when the people created a patron god for themselves, the patron of the tribe, along with the patron gods of other tribes; b) the prophetic period, when the idea of \u200b\u200bthe God of all mankind arose and the desire to turn Jewry into a nation of God-bearers, called to proclaim to the world the idea of \u200b\u200bthis universal God, the source of truth and justice. In the name of this ethical God, the biblical prophets denounced unrighteousness in their people and in others. And so the creator of the book “Job” appeared and raised a protest against God himself, who permits untruth and injustice in the world ruled by him. In the Psalms and in medieval religious poetry, we hear the complaints of the collective Job, the persecuted nation, against God who “chose” it ”( Dubnov S.M. Reflections. P. 617).

26. See about this my article "Horror instead of tragedy (the work of Franz Kafka)" // Problems of Philosophy. 2005. No. 12.

Year of publication: 1921

Posted: 31.12.2015

Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891-1967) is one of the most popular Russian writers of the 20th century, an extremely complex and multifaceted figure. A well-known poet, talented translator, subtle essayist, memoirist, the most famous publicist of the 1930s – 1940s, he was, first of all, an outstanding prose writer, author of many bestsellers. Having passed the test of time, his first book “The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito” and the novel “The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov” that followed it still sound fresh and original. It is not so easy to enroll them in any particular novel heading: lyrical satire, adventurous rogue novels, socio-psychological, parodic, philosophical - all these definitions will be legitimate in their own way. But one way or another, the modern reader will not be disappointed. An exciting reading awaits him.

The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his students Monsieur Dele, Karl Schmidt, Mr. Coole, Alexei Tishin, Ercole Bambuchi, Ilya Ehrenburg and the Negro Aisha, in the days of Peace, war and revolution, in Paris, Mexico, Rome, Senegal, Kineshma , in Moscow and in other places, as well as various opinions of the teacher about pipes, about death, about love, about freedom, about playing chess, about the Jewish tribe, about construction and much more.

Introduction

With the greatest excitement I begin my work, in which I see the goal and justification of my wretched life, to the description of the days and thoughts of the Teacher Julio Jurenito. Suppressed by the kaleidoscopic abundance of events, my memory was prematurely decrepit; malnutrition, mainly lack of sugar, also contributed to this. With fear, I think that many of Teacher's narrations and judgments are forever lost to me and the world. But his image is bright and alive. He stands before me, thin and frantic, in an orange waistcoat, an unforgettable tie with green specks, and grins softly. Teacher, I will not betray you!

I sometimes still write, by inertia, poetry of average dignity, and when asked about my profession I shamelessly answer: "Literator." But all this applies to everyday life: in essence, I have long ceased to love and left such an unproductive way of spending time. I would be very offended if someone took this book as a novel, more or less entertaining. This would mean that I failed to complete the task given to me on the painful day of March 12, 1921, the day of the Master's death. May my words be warm, like his hairy hands, living, homely, like his vest, smelling of tobacco and sweat, on which little Aisha loved to cry, trembling with pain and anger, like his upper lip during a tic attack!

I call Julio Jurenito simply, almost familiarly, “The Teacher,” although he never taught anyone anything; he had neither religious canons, nor ethical precepts, he did not even have a simple, seedy philosophical system. I will say more: a beggar and great, he did not have the miserable rent of an ordinary man in the street - he was a man without convictions. I know that in comparison with him, any deputy will seem like a model of steadfastness of ideas, any quartermaster - the personification of honesty. Violating the prohibitions of all currently existing codes of ethics and law, Julio Jurenito did not justify this with any new religion or new world outlook. Before all the judges of the world, including the revolutionary tribunal of the RSFSR and the priest-marabut of Central Africa, the Teacher would appear as a traitor, a liar and the instigator of innumerable crimes. For who, if not judges, are good dogs, guarding the order and beauty of this world?

Julio Jurenito taught to hate the present, and in order for this hatred to be strong and ardent, he opened the door leading to the great and inevitable tomorrow before us, thrice amazed. Upon learning about his affairs, many will say that he was only a provocateur. This is what wise philosophers and cheerful journalists called him during his lifetime. But the Teacher, without rejecting the venerable nickname, told them: “The provocateur is the great midwife of history. If you do not accept me, a provocateur with a peaceful smile and an eternal pen in your pocket, another will come for a Caesarean section, and it will be bad for the earth. "

But contemporaries do not want, cannot accept this righteous man without religion, a sage who did not study at the faculty of philosophy, an ascetic in a criminal robe. Why did the Teacher tell me to write the book of his life? For a long time I languished with doubts, looking at honest intellectuals, whose old wisdom is maintained, like French cheese, in the comfort of offices with Tolstoy over the table, at these thinkable readers of my book. But an insidious memory rescued me this time. I remembered how the Teacher, pointing to the maple seed, told me: "Yours, or rather, it flies not only into space, but also in time." So, not for spiritual heights, not for the chosen now, barren and doomed, I write, but for the coming lower reaches, for the land plowed not by this plow, on which his children, my brothers, will tumble in blissful idiocy.

Ilya Ehrenburg, 1921

Chapter first.
My meeting with Julio Jurenito. - Damn and dutch pipe

On March 26, 1913, as always, I sat in the Café Rotunda on the Boulevard Montparnasse in front of a cup of coffee I had drunk long ago, waiting in vain for someone to free me by paying the patient waiter six sous. This way of feeding was discovered by me in the winter and has brilliantly justified itself. Indeed, almost always a quarter of an hour before the closing of the cafe, an unexpected liberator appeared - a French poetess, whose poems I translated into Russian, an Argentine sculptor, who for some reason hoped through me to sell his works to "one of the Shchukin princes", an unknown cheater nationality, who won a hefty sum from my uncle in San Sebastian and apparently felt a pang of conscience, finally, my old nanny, who arrived with the gentlemen in Paris and found herself, probably due to the distraction of a policeman who did not see the address, instead of the Russian church on the street I give it to the cafe where the Russian rascals were sitting. This last, in addition to the canonical six sous, gave me a large loaf and, moved, she kissed my nose three times.

Perhaps due to these unexpected deliverances, or perhaps under the influence of other circumstances, such as chronic hunger, reading the books of Léon Blois and various love troubles, I was very mystical and saw in the most wretched phenomena some signs from above. The neighboring shops - colonial and green - seemed to me circles of hell, and the mustachioed baker with a high chignon, a virtuous woman of about sixty, was a shameless ephebe. I unwound in detail the invitation to Paris of three thousand inquisitors for the public burning in the squares of all consuming aperitifs. Then he drank a glass of absinthe and, drunk, recited the poems of St. Teresa, proved to all the accustomed taverns that Nostradamus had already foreseen the nursery of deadly centipedes in the Rotunda, and at midnight he knocked in vain at the cast-iron gates of the Church of Saint Germain des Prés. My days usually ended with a mistress, a Frenchwoman, with decent experience, but a kind Catholic woman, from whom I demanded at the most inopportune moments an explanation of how the seven "mortal" sins differ from the seven "basic" ones. So time passed little by little.

On that memorable evening, I sat in a dark corner of the cafe, sober and perfectly docile. A fat Spaniard was puffing next to me, completely naked, and on his knees a chestless, bony girl chirped, also naked, but in a wide hat that covered her face and in gilded shoes. All around, various more or less undressed people drank mar and calvados. Explained was this spectacle, quite common for the "Rotunda", costumed evening at the "neo-Scandinavian academy." But to me, of course, all this seemed to be a decisive mobilization of the Beelzebub army directed against me. I made various gestures, as if swimming, to shield myself from the sweaty Spaniard and especially from the model's heavy thighs pointed at me. In vain I looked in the cafe for a baker or someone who could replace her, that is, the chief marshal and inspirer of this monstrous action.

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The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his students Monsieur Dele, Karl Schmidt, Mr. Coole, Alexei Tishin, Ercole Bambuchi, Ilya Ehrenburg and the Negro Aisha, in the days of Peace, war and revolution, in Paris, Mexico, Rome, Senegal, Kineshma , in Moscow and in other places, as well as various opinions of the teacher about pipes, about death, about love, about freedom, about playing chess, about the Jewish tribe, about construction and much more.

Introduction

With the greatest excitement I begin my work, in which I see the goal and justification of my wretched life, to the description of the days and thoughts of the Teacher Julio Jurenito. Suppressed by the kaleidoscopic abundance of events, my memory was prematurely decrepit; malnutrition, mainly lack of sugar, also contributed to this. With fear, I think that many of Teacher's narrations and judgments are forever lost to me and the world. But his image is bright and alive. He stands before me, thin and frantic, in an orange waistcoat, an unforgettable tie with green specks, and grins softly. Teacher, I will not betray you!

I sometimes still write, by inertia, poems of average dignity, and when asked about my profession I shamelessly answer: "Literator." But all this relates to everyday life: in essence, I have long ceased to love and left such an unproductive way of spending time. I would be very offended if someone perceived this book as a novel, more or less entertaining. This would mean that I failed to complete the task given to me on the painful day of March 12, 1921, the day of the Master's death. May my words be warm, like his hairy hands, living, homelike, like his vest, smelling of tobacco and sweat, on which little Aisha loved to cry, quivering with pain and anger, like his upper lip during tic attacks!

I call Julio Jurenito simply, almost familiarly, “The Teacher,” although he never taught anyone anything; he had neither religious canons, nor ethical precepts, he did not even have a simple, seedy philosophical system. I will say more: a beggar and great, he did not have the miserable rent of an ordinary man in the street - he was a man without convictions. I know that in comparison with him, any deputy will seem like a model of steadfastness of ideas, any quartermaster - the personification of honesty. Violating the prohibitions of all currently existing codes of ethics and law, Julio Jurenito did not justify this with any new religion or new world outlook. Before all the courts of the world, including the revolutionary tribunal of the RSFSR and the priest-marabut of Central Africa, the Teacher would appear as a traitor, liar and instigator of innumerable crimes. For who, if not judges, are good dogs, guarding the order and beauty of this world?

Julio Jurenito taught to hate the present, and in order for this hatred to be strong and ardent, he opened the door leading to the great and inevitable tomorrow before us, thrice amazed. Upon learning about his affairs, many will say that he was only a provocateur. This is what wise philosophers and cheerful journalists called him during his lifetime. But the Teacher, without rejecting the venerable nickname, told them: “The provocateur is the great midwife of history. If you do not accept me, a provocateur with a peaceful smile and an eternal pen in your pocket, another will come for a Caesarean section, and it will be bad for the earth. "

But contemporaries do not want, cannot accept this righteous man without religion, a sage who did not study at the faculty of philosophy, an ascetic in a criminal robe. Why did the Teacher tell me to write the book of his life? For a long time I languished with doubts, looking at honest intellectuals, whose old wisdom is maintained, like French cheese, in the comfort of offices with Tolstoy over the table, at these thinkable readers of my book. But an insidious memory rescued me this time. I remembered how the Teacher, pointing to the maple seed, told me: "Yours, or rather, it flies not only into space, but also in time." So, not for spiritual heights, not for the chosen now, barren and doomed, I write, but for the coming lower reaches, for the land plowed not by this plow, on which his children, my brothers, will tumble in blissful idiocy.

The appearance of Julio Jurenito to the peoples of Europe and his first and most devoted student Ehrenburg takes place on March 26, 1913 in the Rotunda cafe on the Paris boulevard Montparnasse, at the very hour when the author indulges in despondency over a cup of coffee he has drunk long ago, waiting in vain for someone who will set him free by paying the patient waiter six sous. Taken by Ehrenburg and other regulars of the "Rotunda" for the devil, the stranger turns out to be a much more remarkable person - a hero of the Mexican Civil War, a successful gold digger, an encyclopedic scientist and expert in dozens of living and dead languages \u200b\u200band dialects. But the main vocation of Julio Jurenito, called the Teacher in the novel, is to be the Great Provocateur in the years fatal for humanity.

Following Ehrenburg, Jurenito's disciples and companions on his travels are people who, in other circumstances, are decidedly unable to come together. Mr. Cool, an American missionary repaying a debt to Europe, which once brought the benefits of civilization to the New World: the two powerful levers of history, he believes, are the Bible and the dollar. Among Mr. Coole's projects are such truly ingenious ones as illuminated advertisements over bakeries: "Man does not live by bread alone", equipping shopping pavilions next to scaffolds so that the death penalty from low-standard spectacles turned into popular celebrations, and the expanded production of vending machines for hygiene products in brothels (moreover, on each bag there should be an edifying inscription like this: "Dear friend, do not forget about your innocent bride!"). The direct opposite of the enterprising Catholic Mr. Cool is the negro idolater Aisha, who inspires the Teacher to make various arguments about the place of religion in a world steeped in hypocrisy and pharisaism. “Look at the children more often,” he advises his biographer Ehrenburg. - While a person is wild, empty and ignorant - he is beautiful. It contains a prototype of the coming century! " The fourth student of Julio Jurenito turns out to be Alexei Spiridonovich Tishin, the son of a retired general - a drunkard and a lecher, who spent his youth in a painful choice between marrying the postmaster's daughter and answering the question: "Is it a sin or not a sin to kill the governor?" now the search for truth has led him to Antwerp, where he, considering himself a political emigrant, tortures drinking companions with tragic cries: "Everything is fiction, but tell me, my brother, am I a man or not?" - realizing the rupture of reality with the aphorisms about the high calling of man V. Korolenko and M. Gorky. Another companion of Jurenito is Ercole Bambuchi, the unsurpassed master of spitting in length and height with an accuracy of a millimeter, found by him on the dusty pavement of the eternal city of Rome; his occupation is "none", but if he had to choose, he, by his own admission, would do braces ("This is an amazing thing!"). On puzzled questions - why does he need this tramp? - The teacher replies: “What am I to love if not dynamite? He does everything the other way around, he prefers to spit, because he hates every position and every organization. Clownery? Maybe, but isn't the gleam of freedom still burning on the clown's red wig today? "

The last of the seven apostles Jurenito are the funeral master with a universal sweep, Monsieur Dele and student Karl Schmidt, who built life according to the most complex schedules, where every hour, step and pfennig are taken into account. Bringing them closer to his person, the Teacher sees both their imminent future and the fate of mankind: Dele will get fantastically rich on the victims of World War II, and Schmidt will take a high post in Bolshevik Russia ...

The battle of the nations scatters the company across the face of the earth Some are drafted into the army - like, for example, Aisha, who is losing his hand at the front; others in a grandiose mystery play an unheard-of role - like Ercole Bambuchi, head of the Vatican's economic department, bringing the Holy See the proceeds from the sale of miraculous icons and incense; still others mourn the dying civilization - like Alexei Spiridonovich, rereading Crime and Punishment for the tenth time and falling on the sidewalk in Paris at the exit from the Piazza Opera metro station with a cry: “Knit me! Judge me! I killed a man! " Only Jurenito remains unperturbed: what is to be done is happening. “It was not the people who adapted to the war, but the war adapted to the people. It will end only when it destroys what it began in the name of: culture and state. " Neither the Vatican, blessing new models of machine guns, nor the intelligentsia, fooling the public, nor the members of the International Society of Friends and Supporters of Peace, who study the bayonets and poisonous gases of the warring parties, can stop the war, in order to establish whether there is anything contrary to the generally accepted the rules of "humane slaughter of people."

In the incredible adventures of the Teacher and his seven disciples, only the reader tends to detect absurdities and exaggerations; only an outside observer might think that there are too many “suddenly” and “but” in this story. The fact that in an adventure novel is a clever invention, in the fateful hours of history, is a fact of the biography of the average man. Having escaped being shot on charges of espionage alternately in France and on the German sector of the front, having visited the Hague at the Congress of Social Democrats and on the high seas on a fragile a rally in Petrograd, in the Ciniselli circus (where can such rallies be held, if not in a circus?), our heroes undergo a new series of adventures in the vast expanses of Russia - it seems that it is here that the Teacher's prophecies finally come true, take on the flesh of the utopias of each of his companions.

Alas: here, too, there is no protection from fate, and in the revolutionary crucible are forged all the same vulgarity, stupidity and game, from which they fled for seven years, the disappearance of which they so desired, in their own way. Ehrenburg is confused: really these grandchildren of Pugach, these bearded men, who believe that for everyone's happiness it is necessary, firstly, to slaughter the Jews, and secondly, the princes and the bar ("they have not yet been slaughtered"), and the communists, too, do not interfere , and most importantly - to burn down the cities, because all the evil comes from them - are they really the true apostles of the organization of mankind?

“Dear boy,” Julio Jurenito replies to his beloved disciple with a smile, “have you just now realized that I am a scoundrel, a traitor, a provocateur, a renegade, and so on and so forth? No revolution is revolutionary if it wants order. As for the peasants, they themselves do not know what they want: either to burn down the cities, or to grow peacefully as oak trees on their hillock. But, bound by a strong hand, they eventually fly into the furnace, giving strength to the locomotive they hate ... "

All again - after a terrible storm - "bound by a strong hand." Ercole Bambuchi, as a descendant of the ancient Romans, was taken under the protection of the Department for the Protection of Antiquities. Monsieur Delet is going crazy. Aisha is in charge of the Negro section of the Comintern. Alexei Spiridonovich rereads Dostoevsky in depression. Mr. Cool serves on the Anti-Prostitution Commission. Ehrenburg helps grandfather Durov train guinea pigs. The big boss in the Economic Council, Schmidt, is filling out the passports for the honest company to go to Europe - so that everyone can return to their own place.

The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito
“The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his students: Monsieur Dele, Karl Schmidt, Mr. Coole, Alexei Tishin, Ercole Bambuchi, Ilya Ehrenburg and the negro Aisha, in the days of Peace, war and revolution, in Paris, Mexico, Rome, Senegal, in Kineshma, in Moscow and in other places, as well as various opinions of the teacher about pipes, about death, about love, about freedom, about playing chess, about the Jewish tribe, about construction and many other things "
First edition
Genre:
Original language:
Year of writing:	june-July 1921
Publication:	M.-Berlin: Helikon (Printed in Berlin),; Preface N. Bukharin. - M.-Pg .: State Publishing House [Printed. in M.],; Preface N. Bukharin. - Ed. 2nd. - M.-L .: Gosizdat [Printed. in M.],; Preface N. Bukharin. - Ed. 3rd. - M.-L .: Gosizdat [Printed. in M.],; Complete works: [In 8, etc.] / Obl. artist N. Altman. -M.-L .: Land and factory [Printed. in M.],. T. 1; Collected works: In 9 and so / Comment. A. Ushakova; Artist. F. Zbarsky. - M .: Goslitizdat,. T. 1

"The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito" (listen (inf.)) - a novel by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, published in 1922 and now considered one of his best books. It came out with a preface by Bukharin, had extraordinary success in the 1920s, in subsequent years it was withdrawn and placed in a special storage, was not republished until the 1960s.

Plot

The novel is written in the first person; the narrator Ilya Ehrenburg made himself, a beggar Russian emigrant in Paris on March 26, 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Sitting in the Rotunda cafe on Boulevard Montparnasse, he meets a demonic personality - Julio Jurenito, who takes him as an apprentice, then acquires new followers, engages in mysterious and fraudulent activities, travels through Europe and Africa, and eventually finds himself in revolutionary Russia, where he died on March 12, 1921 in Konotop, bequeathed to Ehrenburg to write his biography.

Characters

• Julio Jurenito - "Teacher"

• His students:

1. Ilya Ehrenburg, a Russian Jew, devoted, enthusiastic and somewhat naive follower
2. Mr. Cool, American businessman who believes in the dollar and the Bible
3. Aisha, Senegalese negro, fight in the Parisian hotel "Majestic"
4. Alexey Spiridonovich Tishin, Russian intellectual, originally from Yelets, reads Vladimir Solovyov
5. Ercole Bambuchi, italian bum
6. Monsieur Dele, French entrepreneur, funeral master
7. Karl Schmidt, German student

These characters also appear in other works of the writer - Mr. Cool appears in the DE Trust, Monsieur Delay in Thirteen Pipes.

Prototypes

Predictions

• Mass extermination of Jews:

In the near future, solemn sessions of the destruction of the Jewish tribe will take place in Budapest, Kiev, Jaffa, Algeria and in many other places. The program will include, in addition to the traditional pogroms loved by the respected public, also restoration in the spirit of the era: burning Jews, burying them alive in the ground, spraying fields with Jewish blood and new techniques, such as: "evacuation", "cleaning from suspicious elements", etc. , etc. The place and time will be announced separately. The entrance is free.

• Nuclear weapons in Japan:

He pinned all his hopes on the well-known effects of rays and on radium. (...) One day the Teacher came out to me cheerful and lively; despite all the difficulties, he found a means that would greatly facilitate and hasten the cause of the destruction of mankind. (...) I know that he made the apparatus and left it to Mr. Cool for safekeeping. When a year later he finally wanted to use them, Mr. Cool began to postpone the case in every possible way, assuring him that he had taken the devices to America, and that no one could be ordered to bring them, and so on. I thought that Mr. Kohl was guided in this by considerations of a financial nature, but somehow he admitted that the Germans can be finished off with French bayonets, and Jurenito's tricks are better left for the future for the Japanese. Subsequently, circumstances developed in such a way that the Master never remembered this invention, but in any case - I know this for certain - the apparatus and explanatory notes are now in the hands of Mr. Coole.

• German attitude towards the occupied lands:

We'll have to clear a pretty hefty chunk of Picardy soon, for strategic reasons; it is possible that we will not go back there, and it is already obvious that we will not add it. Therefore, I am preparing the correct destruction of this area. A very painstaking task. It is necessary to study all trades: in Ame the soap factory - to blow up; Shawnee is famous for pears - cutting down trees; there are excellent dairy farms near Saint-Quentinet - to transfer the cattle to us and so on. We will leave the bare ground. If this could be done all the way to Marseilles and the Pyrenees, I would be happy ...

Writing history and stylistic characteristics

As Ehrenburg writes in his memoirs, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe novel was formed in him when he was in revolutionary Kiev. He wrote the book in no time at the Belgian resort of De Panne.

The book consists of a preface and 35 chapters. The first 11 chapters are a collection of students and the Teacher's reasoning about various topics, the next 11 are their fates during the World War, then another 11 chapters are devoted to their fates in revolutionary Russia. The penultimate chapter is about the death of the Teacher; and the latter serves as an afterword.

The novel is a kind of parody of the Gospels: Jurenito is bred as a Teacher, his followers become the likeness of the apostles; his birthday is indicated - this is the feast of the Annunciation, his surname, as the nickname of Christ, begins with the letter "X", he dies at the age of 33, substituting his own head under the bullets, Ehrenburg escapes in this scene in horror, and then compares himself to the renounced Peter. The impression is facilitated by the presentation of the topic by the author - with reverence for Jurenito, interrupting events with parables.

In addition, elements of the Baroque style (eg long title) are noted; and also the obvious influence of the rogue novel.

Perception

Links

Bibliography

• Sergey Zemlyanoy. “Revolution and provocation. About the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg "Julio Jurenito" ".
• Kantor, Vladimir Karlovich. Metaphysics of the Jewish "no" in the novel by Ilya Ehrenburg "Julio Jurenito" / Russian-Jewish culture / Mezhdunar. issled. the center grew. and Eastern Europe. Jewry; ed. O. V. Budnitskiy (editor-in-chief), O. V. Belova, V. V. Mochalova. - M.: ROSSPEN, 2006 .-- 495 p. : l. color silt ; 22 cm - Tit. l., ref. parallel in English. lang. - Decree. names: 484-492. - Bibliography. in note. at the end of Art. - 1000 copies. - ISBN 5-8243-0806-3 (in translation)
• D.D. Nikolaev. Woland against Julio Jurenito // Bulletin of Moscow State University. Philology. - 2006. - No. 5.