here is a logical chain that indicates that the best can turn into evil, yes, and babel does this masterfully, well, we continue to talk about isaac immanuilovich babel, and we are having this conversation with elena iosifovna pogorelskaya, who is working now over the preparation of the collected works of babel in five volumes at the world institute. please tell me,

babel is still an inventor, an ernik, well, here is a person who strives to make the ordinary unusual, i remember the story in the basement of the death scene of the dutch, dutch-jewish, if you like, the philosopher benedict spinoza, well , spinoza came up with a lot, yes, pantheism, i once knew this very well, natura naturans, natura naturata, creative nature, nature. created, this man, immersed in philosophical abstractions, dies, suddenly at the moment of his death the artist rubens appears, this clearly could not be, this is not that babel modifies his life, rearranges something, this is the 16th century, how to be here , why, why is this being done, well, yes, indeed rubins, who died, if i memory serves 37 years before spinoza's death, however, in babel's story.

ends up at the philosopher’s bedside, but you know, babel said in the second half of the thirties: literature consists of three phenomena: firstly, real life, you need to know real life very well, secondly, forget this real life, thirdly, blind such a dazzling light that it was real life. how great it is said, i didn’t know this, where did this come from? it was he who gave an interview to a komsomolskaya correspondent true, trigubu, semyon trigu is like that, as it’s so well said, you need to know life, you need to forget life, you need to give birth to it again, give birth to it, yes, absolutely right, another thing like that, that means, in the thirty-seventh year on september 28 at a meeting with young writers , he says that if i...

you mean you said about the story in the basement about spinoza and rubins, and i have two more examples, cunarmia, it begins with two geographical substitutions, not even displacements, but substitutions, yes, crossing the harness , firstly, there is no harness, novograd lies on the river of chance, this is one, and then supposedly, it means the convoy moves along the highway running from brest to...

during the soviet-polish war, but they, without the participation of the first cavalry army, means that bruch appeared, well, not during the period of the action described in the story, later, well, with at the end there, even from the beginning

of twenty-one, it was part of the soviet-polish border, my opinion, well, well, the researchers seem to agree on this, yes, because this is the border. border river, this means the transition, right away, yes, as if right away kakazaga, since this one, brest, warsaw highway, it is, well, like the ultimate goal, yes, let's say, yes, this is the west, but, for me, why the harness, i think that for the babel this sound is there, there is this transition through the harness, yes, that's the transition through the case, if we said so. this would not be the same, but this is one of the reasons, yes , it’s purely artistic, yes, it was the opinion of a professional, now the opinion of a non- professional, can i tell you how i perceive it, how students perceive it, i ask them what the war is not described in general everyone clearly remembers the really

soviet-polish war of the twenty-first year, the twentieth, the twenty-first too, so well, i’m talking about the eventful kunarmy. he is building a war of the worlds, yes, that is, there is a catholic world, there is a jewish world, there is a soviet world, this is such a very generalized picture, yes, so the fact that this is abstracted from the reporting that they took this city, they took that -that city is very important artistically, although i agree with you. that this sound shell of the name of the river is also very important, well, anyway, let’s ask you have a question about the most important thing for me, again , i am a reader, i study the history of literature, but of a different time, earlier, later, but here i am just a reader, and i

always repeat the famous phrase of viktor shklovsky, that babel does not change voices, he speaks in the same way... what should i call it, this is some kind of strange expressionism, remember the terrible ending of this same story, crossing the bruch, where you will find a father better than my father, first crossing the river, where who -he drowns and loudly denigrates the mother of god, but here the sun rolls around like a severed head, and then suddenly it turns out that... the mistress of the house puts him next to the corpse of her hacked father in the pogrom, but all this is said, well, somehow with an intonation that is not very easy to catch, such a van gogh that yes, yes, it’s like

an expression that transforms nature into such twisted lines of force, like this, no, this is a paradox.

lyricism, even heroic pathos, irony, please tell me, this is how we relate to the end of the issue, let’s talk, but how do the two relate?

what makes them different is very kunamiya, it resulted in a book, ultimately, yes, kunamiya is, this is a book with such a very thoughtful author’s composition, they even sometimes say a novel inspired by babel, odessa stories, a cycle, it consists of only four stories, when babel formed it, he built it strictly according to the chronology of the first publics.

yes, just lyubka kaza cossack and then the thirty-second year - this is the end of the almshouse, not published during babel’s lifetime by fraim grach. here's the last question i'll ask you, you they just said about the story by fraim grach, in the nineties, readers got used to the fact that they get acquainted with new texts by babel, which had not been published before, this is... what awaits readers in the near future, maybe new texts, maybe new interpretations,

what will be in the collected works, and what will be the fate of the reader's money, what will change, this is the forecast, is it possible to give something new in principle, will it be, no, what will be new, what do you think, how will the fate of pabel develop in the second quarter of the 21st century, i hope she will develop happily, but... we will make efforts to this, but if we talk about the collected works that are now being prepared, yes, it will be, well, maybe the most complete, five volumes, five volumes, but due to the fact that it will all known and identified epistolary heritage of babel has been published, and let texts be included that never, well, in books, especially in collected works.

there are a lot of documents, yes, cavalry ones, and naturally, this will be

a commentary in which experience will be taken into account modern predecessors, of course, well, here are our respected interlocutors, you can be sure that the new five-volume collected works of isaac babel will be interesting and important, a lot of wonderful discoveries await you, today we talked with the leader. however, work on the collected works of babel at the institute of world literature, senior researcher at the institute of world literature, academy of sciences, elena iosifovna. i thank you, dear elena iosipovna, for this wonderful conversation, thank you, i am sure that we see you again on our podcast, to you, our dear friends, as always, i say, read with pleasure.

hello, dear friends, this is the podcast life of the remarkable, i am its host, writer alexey varlamov. today i am alone in this studio, and my heroine will be the wonderful one of the most fantastic russian women of the silver age, nina ivanovna petrovskaya. i don’t know how familiar this name is to you, but i assure you that her fate is extremely curious and instructive. sometimes she was compared to nastasya filippovna from roman dostoevsky's idiot, sometimes scarman, well, or scarman, but it seems to me that the most exact parallel that could be drawn here would be to remember her mother-in-law, nina zarechnaya from chekhov’s seagull. this is exactly the fate of this

wonderful, sensitive girl who decided to become an actress, who fell in love with an older woman. talented writer and whose life, in general, turned out to be broken, did not work out, to some extent, it was this chekhov play that predicted the fate of nina petrovskaya herself, and in general the fact that in this play chekhov carefully looks at this is a new phenomenon that arose in russian culture, in russian history, russian decadence, russian modernism, this is all deeply not accidental, so, nina petrovskaya: we know very little about its origin. in the spring of 1879 , a girl was born into the family of an official in moscow, who was named nina. she was very pretty, with big eyes that looked at the world around her with enthusiasm, anxiety, and curiosity. probably very attractive, because in her youth she

had many suitors, one of them turned out to be future... there is a lot of fate in childhood, one can say so, in her youth in childhood about some missed opportunities, about some wrong ones, sadly plunged into her fate, in general in her probably, the paths along which she went, if it’s only possible now, more than 100 years later, to talk about these wrong choices that she made in life, but nevertheless, she married sergei alekseevich

sokolov, he was a young lawyer who decided to become a poet. century, everyone around was creating, everyone around was writing poetry, everyone they understood that creativity is the highest, the most beautiful thing in life, so nina petrovskaya’s future husband also decided to take up poetry, but god did n’t give him very much talent, he couldn’t do it with poetry, then he found a very right very true move: if no one wants to publish you, start publishing yourself, of course this word was not yet in the unit, but nevertheless... he had the opportunity, the financial opportunity to create his own publishing house, so sergei sokolov creates a publishing house, which he called grif, takes a pseudonym sergei krechitov, it was this man, sergei krechitov, who became the husband of nina petrovskaya, from the very beginning, in general, their union did not work out, perhaps because she was

such a maximalist by nature, she was drawn to what was real talented, to what was real. brightly, she herself studied literature, wrote poetry herself, wrote prose herself, but obviously, later vladislav khodosevich wrote wonderfully about this in an article called the end of renata, it is with this article that a brilliant book of memoirs opens khadosevich and necropolis, so khodosevich, precisely reflecting on the fate of nina petrovskaya, said that people of the silver age often mixed life and creativity, some had more talent for writing. others had more talent for living, but from hadasevich’s point of view, the story of nina petrovskaya is the story of a girl, the story of a woman who mixed these two too much...

the poet who had a very great personal impact on her was konstantin balmont. balmont at that time was really such a literary star. he was very popular, fans and admirers of his work crowded around him, at some point our heroine turned out to be one of them. she fell in love with balmont. balmont reciprocated her feelings, so to speak, but it was... clearly not what nina was counting on, nina wanted to be exclusive, and for balmont she was just one of his fans, this absolutely did not satisfy her, they soon

broke up , but as khodosevich later wrote, this ecstasy, well, maybe not of first love, but of first falling in love with great russian poet, this first love affair that arose in her life, it left a very bitter aftertaste, a kind of hangover. subsequently, she spoke mockingly about balbonte, spoke badly, she, in fact, of course, did not know how to forgive and did not want to forgive men for the insults that they inflicted on her, but she was very attractive, life was ahead anyway, and this mistake taught her didn’t teach her whether it was a mistake or not, you can argue about this endlessly, but one way or another in her feminine fate, in her...

nikolai bugaev, boris nikolaevich bugaev, who is much more, of course, known to everyone as andrei bely, he took this pseudonym, andrei. it was with this name that he entered russian literature as a poet, prose writer, publicist and intellectual, and a theorist of symbolism, which is very important. andrei bely, unlike balmont, was not only simply talented as a poet, but he was a man for whom poetry was everything, it was his philosophy, it was his religion, it was the form of his life, here is nina petrovskaya about this i just wrote that... balmont could be divided, there was balmont the man, there was balmont the poet, in some sense they did not coincide at all, it was hard to even believe that this selfish, narcissistic narcissist could write such

vivid , interesting poems. as for the white, here, as it seems to me, the situation was a little more complicated or, perhaps , on the contrary, simpler, because the white poet and the white man were much closer to each other. white was a very interesting person, but white was... unusual, if the attitude balmont to the same nina petrovskaya to other women was quite, well, roughly speaking, consumerist and it was clear what he wanted from her, as far as andrei bely is concerned, he perceived her not just as an admirer, not just as a fan, in a sense, he perceived her as his student, as his adept, and here the situation, in a certain sense, turned upside down, now nina rather wanted. love wanted some kind of ordinary human happiness, but the white man in general was not ready for this, the white man was not strived, bely had generally different views on the nature of man, on the nature

of the relationship between man and the talent of man and god, a different view on the relationship between man and woman, therefore nina, who turned out to be, well, so to speak, with all her unusualness and fantasticness, she turned out to be too much for bely... venda, too earthly, their correspondence, and in general people of the silver age loved to write letters, and pistols of the silver age, everything we know about this is the correspondence of blok, and bely, correspondence between rosenov and florentsky, and many other correspondences can be named, so nina petrovskaya and andrei bely also wrote letters to each other, but later nina ivanovna solemnly drowned all these letters in lake saimaa in finland. now, if we draw this parallel between nina petrovskaya and nina zarechnaya and, accordingly , between andrei bely, with whom nina petrovskaya was in love and the writer.

she was obviously such a bundle of not only beauty and charm, but a bundle of energy, and all kinds of energy, yes, she had femininity in her over the edge, one can assume that she would simply be charged with this femininity, like an electric current, when bely was shocked by this current, then in general he preferred to get away from this plot, and as she later ironically wrote that andrei bely’s mother ordered him ... during holy week she left me for nizhny novgorod, and bely really left her, although later they still continued to communicate, because in fact the circle of these decadent writers and poets was quite narrow and they could just run away like that they still couldn’t be apart from each other, it was then, after this break with andrei bely , that a man appeared on nina petrovskaya’s horizon who determined her

fate, it was no less... famous and no less significant poet of the russian silver age , valery bryusov. valery bryusov was also not only a poet, but if the white one, andrei bely , rather deviated towards theory, then bryusov , despite the fact that he was not alien to theory, and bryusov was in many ways one of the creators and such intellectual creators of russian symbolism and russian savagery in general. and bryusov , as if from childhood, decided for himself that he would be precisely the leader of russian symbolism, in a sense, the leader of russian literature, but it was no coincidence that bryusov was probably born into a merchant family and he has all these theoretical ideas of his, all these his utopian dreams, they often took on a very specific form, and bryusov, in addition to the fact that he was a poet, he was a publisher, and he was a very good publisher, and he really published very

important ... magazines in the era of symbolism, in in particular scorpio magazine, which was very difficult to get into. bryusov had a very strict attitude towards literature in general, he was a real master, and he really believed that serving literature is the highest thing that can be in life, it’s work, it’s not even work, but it’s a person’s way of existence, which requires everything from him , and... therefore, to be published by bryusov was such a supreme dream, it was the highest level of initiation for young authors of that time, and nina petrovskaya’s husband, that same sergei sokolov, sergei krechitov, with which i began our story, it certainly did not pass by these bryusov standards, but the fact that krechitov created his own publishing house, the publishing house was called grif.

which began to compete with bryusov’s scorpion, this angered valery yakovlevich very much, no one likes competition, so his attitude towards this house and this family was initially wary at best, and rather even negative. at first, he generally did not pay attention to nina petrovskaya. bryusov had his own difficult personal life, but when bryusov, which belongs to white.

because he had been writing a novel for a long time, or rather , he was preparing to write a novel, he was writing a novel, and in order to write this novel, he , of course, had to rely on some realities of life. some destinies, some facts, yes, that’s how it is, if a house is being built, scaffolding is needed, and some of these very scaffoldings that will surround the construction of his novel were what he needed, and one can assume that the fate of nina petrovskaya greatly inspired him as a creator, as a writer, it was then that he conceived the novel, which later brought him great fame, and which is still considered one of the best russian novels of the silver age, it... has been translated into many languages, prokofiev wrote an opera based on this novel, the novel is called “the fiery angel”. and here is the love triangle that is at the heart of this novel, set in the middle ages in europe. blues in general was very

fond of history, mixing times, transferring some modern events to the middle ages or vice versa, evoking the spirits of the middle ages from time immemorial and... andrei bely’s nina petrovskaya, as if humanly, intervenes in her, lives her, and then he needs all this in order to write a novel, that is, in fact, nina petrovskaya initially appears. on bryusov’s horizon as, well, if i may say so, as a kind of muse, but the muse is not in such a high sense of the word as it was with pushkin, no, it is such a more consumerist, yes, more pragmatic attitude towards the person who will inspire its

creation artistic image, it should be noted that in general nina petrovskaya is not she was some kind of fool, one cannot say that she was just a naive victim, in the hands of all these poetic geniuses. of the times that surrounded her, she actually wanted this, she strove for this, she can be assumed, intuitively feeling that , in fact, if she lacks direct literary talent in order to create artistic texts, then let her manifest herself female, her human talent to become, well, to put it so roughly, literary material for writing works of art, which is why her union... with bryusov, initially turned out to be so ugly harmonious, let me allow myself, such a connection is such an axiomoron, but it seems to me that it can very accurately reflect what was happening then, this is how this novel

began: bryusov unexpectedly became a frequent visitor to the family of krechatov, sokolov and nina petrovskaya, who were very fond of seances; this was also such a common phenomenon for the silver age. everyone really liked to indulge in spiritualism, they called upon some spirits, sometimes they staged some very funny hoaxes. nina petrovskaya later recalled what it meant, when bryusov first came to them for a spiritualistic session, nothing happened, and bryusov was very dissatisfied, bryusov took this matter seriously, that is, they sat there around the table, took hold of each other hands, they began to summon some spirits there, but the spirits did not want to appear, and bryusov sternly said that apparently one of those present...

we need to get rid of this, then, then, bryusov said, bryusov, he considered himself such a warlock , magician, heir to the great bruce, who even in the time of peter i, was such a warlock, came to moscow, and bryusov believed that he had inherited this warlock talent, so that means bryusov gathered this whole company, they went to this estate near moscow, where the newlyweds lived, it also means they started holding some kind of spiritualistic seance there, but they also didn’t succeed. because it turned out that there was no actual knocking, grunting or any mystical voices in this house, but simply the owner of this house wanted to kick these newlyweds out, they somehow didn’t like him there arranged, and for this he played out the whole thing, this fact, when some

serious, tragic, funny, hand in hand walked through life in literature, this is also very typical for the silver age, but the results of all these dates, all these... meanings of this word, in the fullness of this word, which, in fact, is what nina wanted, later she did so, a little pretentiously, i can’t vouch for the exact quote, but its meaning was that she later recalled, that bryusov poured her a tart glass of wine in which his passion was dissolved, she drank this glass and was poisoned by this glass for 7 years, in the summer of 1905... in this fatal summer for russia, yes, the summer when

the first russian revolution was taking place, when the events of the russian-japanese war took such a tragic turn, that’s when it began their romance, they go to finland, to lake saimaa, yes, finland, as we remember, was then part of the russian empire, it was there, at the request of bryusov on lake saimaa, that nina petrovskaya drowned the letters of andrei bely, and they have... like this happy, wonderful, wonderful love, after which they return to moscow, well, in general, bryusov got everything he wanted to get, in principle, reasoning a little cynically like this, he didn’t need nina anymore, and here she, in a sense , stepped on the same steps for the second or third time the very rake, when these...

events in their lives, they took care of everything that related to every day they lived, so bryusov had what is called a don juan list, in this list he divided all the women who came to his attention according to rankings, yes, i was in love with this one, this one was in love with me, this one i i was just paying attention, he wrote about only one woman: i loved her, this woman. there was nina petrovskaya, that is, finland,

lake saimaa, this crazy summer, june 1905, still did not pass without a trace for him, after all, she planted these roots of hers, she planted them in his heart, and it was so easy to part he couldn’t with her, she of course wanted more, she of course wanted the continuation of this love and the passion that flared up there, well, like probably in anyone’s life. woman demanded, she probably assumed that some others would follow steps, but bryusov himself was no longer ready for these other steps, a whole volume of letters has been preserved, it was not so long ago published in full in our country, and with these letters there is also such a very interesting story, when you read this correspondence, then in general , there is a feeling of awkwardness, because this is a very intimate correspondence, because in this... correspondence nina petrovskaya simply really bares, tears at her soul in the most

literal sense of the word, and this is by far the best thing she wrote, all of her literary, all her human, all of her the feminine talent is in these letters, but it ’s like the poems of marina tsvetaeva, maybe it’s too bold a comparison, but my dear, what did i do to you, this is what i unclenched both hands for once, and yesterday i was leveling with the chinese state, this is this ...she expressed in prose, and poetic prose, absolutely wonderful prose, she did not want these letters to be published, but bryusov wanted them to. bryusov left a special will, where he said that their correspondence should be published through, he was a very prudent person, which means after 10 years after his or her death, but whoever dies later, this correspondence should be published, the editorial board, i say, was very professional, a real publisher,

who do you think should be on the editorial board that will be involved in the publication of these letters , nina petrovskaya’s first husband, the same one, they later divorced, by the way, yes, and bryusov, one might say, took her away from her husband, but nevertheless, the husband should join the editorial board, of course, balmont, of course, andrei bely, yes, all these people should definitely study, that means editing there, well, not editing, but in any case, make sure that this correspondence is correctly published. bryusov could not have imagined that 10 years after his death, and her death, it would already be the thirties in the stalinist soviet union, no one was interested in either... petrovskaya, in general, these letters lay in the archive for a long, long time, only in two thousand years were published, by the way, very well published with very deep, serious comments, a wonderful introductory article in the new publishing house literary review, if anyone wants to read such a real epistolary

novel, a tragic novel of incredible intensity, then i highly recommend finding this book, it creates awkwardness when you read it, but at the same time you... realizing that it indeed, here is a striking example, this is what the silver age was, how people lived, how they simply really sacrificed their lives, from these letters one can very clearly see these fluctuations from despair to hope, they either parted or came together again, then they met in moscow on nikitsky boulevard, then they went to paris, then again she showered him with reproaches and could not forgive him that this way of life, this kitchen, this cooking, this playing cards on sundays, what bryusov really loved to do and what he found respite from all his poetic flights, this is so important to him that he cannot leave his wife and give himself entirely to nina, as she, nina gave yourself to him. nina really wanted

equality, she wanted equality in these relationships, and by the way, here you can again recall chekhov’s seagull, where... everything was exactly like that, and brezov wrote the novel “fiery angel,” a novel that was a success, a novel in which he killed nina, that is, in the end of this novel, nina dies, in general it is clear that as a literary character, he no longer needs her, and as a prototype of this character, probably too, nina was, of course, furious, she was a very harsh woman, and there is evidence from bryusov, he writes about this zennaidiya nikolaevna, gipios, who him too...

to motivate bryusov, to abandon this constant that was in her life, then she began to act on him in other ways, she began to openly cheat on him with a variety of people, and naturally people from the literary world, and one of her lovers was sergei auslender, he was a young and interesting poet, not of the same

talent, of course, as the white balmont or bryusov, but nevertheless, such a creative personality also deserves attention. he was the nephew of mikhail kuzmin, another very a major important poet of the silver age, it was with him that nina began an affair, with him nina went to italy, subsequently auslander also wrote about this and some work of art, and nina wrote some stories, that is, this is also very typical, here they live everything that they live is immediately reflected in literature, and it seems that they lived, and khadasevich wrote about this, not just to live, but so that what they... lived was how people do today selfie, here we go , they took selfies in much the same way, all this went into literature, but another thing is that someone managed to combine it, someone managed to not perish, not to disappear, but for nina petrovskaya, unfortunately, all these experiments on her own destiny that

she carried out, they did not pass without a trace for her, because...