Trench word
Simple thought always ruled the rulers of the minds of the writers — in any case, the best of them: after all, in ancient antiquity, the commandment “do not kill!” Arose, because the life of every person is a miracle granted by God; and it remains only to guess why God permits wars, in which not even thousands but millions of people perish.
... In the cold winter of 1914-1915, in the most severe frosts, from Vyatka to Kazan, two military representatives went to the tent for a new recruitment: Ensign Z. and Ensign S. After the usual and immediately boring road conversations, after the boredom of the day-long trip, S. suddenly snatched the revolver and began shooting at the porcelain insulators on the telegraph poles. This unpleasantly struck Z., and he very rudely ordered the satellite to stop. Warrant Officer Z. - Zoshchenko (pictured) - began to write after the war. And this is what we read about this incident from the biography of the future writer in his novel “Before the Sunrise”:
“I expect scandal, scream. But instead, I hear a plaintive voice in response. He says:
- Ensign Zoshchenko ... do not stop me. Let me do what I want. I will come to the front and they will kill me.
I look at his snub nose, I look into his pitiful bluish eyes. I remember his face in almost thirty years. He was indeed killed the second day after he arrived at the position.
During that war, ensigns lived on average no more than twelve days. ”
This is the first impression of the future writer of the Great War.
A quarter of a century later another bloody, extremely bloodthirsty war began. Considering himself almost a professional military man, Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, by that time a famous writer, “well, a very funny humorist,” who really liked the common people who won the revolution, was going to fight. But the years and health were not the same, and he was sent to the evacuation. And there, under the shadow of the Alma-Ata poplars, birches and apricots, Zoshchenko finally wrote the main novel of his life, “Before the Sunrise,” which, in my opinion, completely restores his reputation as a nobleman, son of an artist and actress, intelligent, thin and vulnerable person. Let me recall at least the description of this lonely gloomy traveler in the novel “My Diamond Crown” by Valentin Kataev, by the way, also an order-bearer of the First World War, St. George’s Cavalier: “He measured me with an arrogant look of his eyes, like almonds not cleaned from brown skins, dark-olive face ... "; however, a few minutes after the awkward exchange of views, the two talented Soviet writers became friends.
The First World War not only injured Zoshchenko and poisoned him with chemical weapons, which the enemy had just begun to use. She changed something in the minds of this serious young man.
Let me guess that the fault was inevitable because of the close joint military life of the mixing of classes and cultures. No, no insurmountable contradictions arose, they, officers and privates, lived in trenches together ... And Zoshchenko began to write afterwards - but as if not with his own language. As if only for those who understand - for the simple, as the truth, comrades of arms. As if he had put on an inseparable mask.
Since his youth, Mikhail Mikhailovich has been tormented by a depression in which the war contributed its note and contribution. And he, a kind of home-grown Freudian, decided to remember everything - and still find the cause of his mental pain in order to heal. The episodes of the First World War are among the most powerful in his later book. The novel "Before Sunrise" will outlast the century.
The war and the Russian revolutions that followed it went not only according to Mikhail Zoshchenko. Take at random three more beginners, later famous writers - Mikhail Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha and Panteleimon Romanov, who, for various reasons, had no direct relationship to the fighting in the “German” war. But the atmosphere of the war was well known to them. But the revolution and the subsequent lightning mixing of people with different views and cultural experience in the same staircase, in the same communal kitchen, they themselves survived. And as a result, as well as Zoshchenko, they were forced to have an intimate relationship with the most cheerful muse of Greece - the comedy muse, Talia. Bulgakov, the son of a theologian, skillfully melted the red-stone from Moscow with skillfully pepper from the Moscow region and skillfully melted down the natural intelligence of the intellectual before the new times into irony. Romanov, a descendant of impoverished nobles, became equally observant and ironic by the writer of a new urban, and of a new rural life. Shlyahtich Olesha - he generally turned into a chisel, a popular whistle "Hooter."
Konstantin Paustovsky, from the same cohort, and better and warmer to say, the company of writers, during the First World War, went to the combat area in the sanitary train and survived with his mother - at a distance - a terrible tragedy.
On the same day in different parts of the front stretching for hundreds of miles, his two brothers, Pavel and Vadim, were killed. It is not difficult to guess that he named his eldest son Vadim so in memory of the murdered brother.
For all his life Konstantin Georgievich remembered blood, dirt, war, melted snow and slush of peaceful Polish and Belarusian areas, which, a century after the Napoleonic invasion, had time to get used to sowing, harvesting, digging potatoes, religious processions and prayers, but not to trampling Thousands of pairs of soldiers' boots and howling shells over churches and churches. Subsequently, much later, Paustovsky, like Zoshchenko, described what he saw and felt. His great Story Marlene Dietrich, who was fortunate enough (!) To kneel before Paustovsky, as a sign of inexpressible respect for him, or rather admiration for him (at that time already seriously ill), loved him very much. Moscow “He is the best of those Russian writers whom I know,” wrote brilliant Marlene in her Reflections. “... It is probably surprising that I have so few favorite writers: Goethe, Rilke, Hamsun, Hemingway, Remarque and later discovery — Paustovsky.”
By all appearances, Paustovsky, this truly amazing writer, did not want to recall the military episodes. But they, as if by military pressure, still slipped into the pages of his other, quite peaceful tales and stories. Do not forget ...
Marlene Dietrich, by the way, also knew that war firsthand. One of the most poignant episodes in her book mentioned is how she, a small, well-educated German schoolgirl who had already lost several relatives in the First World War, on July evening in a well-marked little white summer dress runs to the camp for French prisoners of war, pushes prisoners through barbed wire white roses and speaks to them, who do not immediately trust her, in correct French: “Today is Bastille Day, and I thought that these roses should have made you happy!”
People are always people, if they are real people, no matter how deep the trenches are or they are divided.
Stand apart in stories Russian literature of the twentieth century, a writer who did not live to see even the end of the Civic, - Fedor Dmitrievich Kryukov. Lecturer, State Duma deputy, State Councilor, journalist who worked in one of the most respected pre-revolutionary journals - “Russian Wealth”, in World War I, just like Paustovsky, was in the sanitary squad. Kryukov wrote memorable stories, which, unfortunately, the modern reader is not so well known. According to modern literary scholars, all the stories and stories of Fyodor Kryukov are absolutely documentary.
The rich imagination and incredibly powerful talent of Mikhail Sholokhov, the future winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, his phenomenal memory allowed him to create an epic about the Don Cossacks with his truthfulness. By his junior years, Mikhail Alexandrovich did not hit the world war. But he, nevertheless, included military episodes in “Silent Don”, asking the village people who had fought about them.
And yet it so happened that the “main” writers, from the works of which the Soviet reader drew his impressions of the First World War, were the German Remark and the American Hemingway. Both were participants in the fighting, and therefore they sincerely believed.
For the novel "On the Western Front without Change," Erich Maria Remarque was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but did not receive it. And two years later, after the Nazis came to power, his book in Germany was publicly burned, finding the author a traitor to the memory of the heroes of the First World War ...
Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, it was not by chance that he became an idol of several generations. His strong, truly masculine novels “Farewell to Arms!” And especially “And the Sun Rises (Fiesta)” with his soul-nourishing story about the impossibility of love between loving each other Jake Barnes and Lady Bret Ashley because of the terrible injury of Jake contain irrefutable accusations against war as such. Why, not everyone reads novels ...
Another Nobel Prize winner in literature - the German writer Thomas Mann, who did not object at all - on the occasion - talked seriously and in detail about his own work, didn’t go to war in his time, at that time was old: thirty-nine. But he had a certain attitude towards the war. It was, in his words, "German-positive." Then, fortunately, a lot has changed in this worldview. However, it is important for the reader that T. Mann, one of his main and best novels - “The Magic Mountain” - wrote under the impression of the First World War, which “unexpectedly enriched” him with new life experience.
The Magic Mountain is a magical, wondrous, one-of-a-kind book about time. And it was precisely the time that had suddenly thickened and turned blood red to make Thomas Mann pain in his heart to write the last five bright, sharply different from all previous mocking narration of the pages, which are also a slap in the face of the war.
In a certain sense, the “magic mountain” is any human life, the life of every person with his strange perception of time as something infinite in childhood and adolescence, and sprint in old age, like a kangaroo. It is easy to imagine life in the form of a beautiful green, for example, Himalayan mountain, with its valleys covered with a floral carpet, with clear streams and blue from the fresh air. You go, you go ... What is there, just beyond the summit - the center of life not known until the time: the calm wilderness highland or a steep precipice of sudden death? Do not guess! And only then one can foresee the fate of millions of people, when merciless clouds of a military thunderstorm gather around the beautiful mountains. Lightning after lightning, blow after blow, explosion after explosion, bullet after bullet - millions of young people, namely young lives, bring the war to the abyss of death, and they never again pass through highland maturity and old age ... And the parents of these young creatures think, not without reason there are such cases that the mountains themselves are crumbling, the very foundation of life, because it is known that the foundation and strength of families are not old founders, but children, future generations ...
More than ten million people, according to historians, died in the First World War. Together with people, several empires disappeared from the face of the earth, Italian fascism and Nazism arose in Germany.
The usual way of life was destroyed in different countries, and especially in Russia.
All this was observed and understood by people who, on fate, wrote vigorously to see, to think better and, most importantly, to be able to display their thoughts on paper - journalists and writers. But even they, so wise and talented, could not even prevent the new war in that wise and knowledgeable twentieth century ...
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