Lyrics - voices are calling me. Intimate Notes of an Edwardian English Dandy Youth: Its Legacy
everything for the first time... thirst for knowledge... attempts and disappointments... search for oneself... again carries somewhere... reckless frenzy of fun... emptiness of the morning hangover... ardent confessions, kisses... stormy showdowns... depression... endless nights... retreat into oneself, detachment... quiet philosophy... new aspirations... again fly into the flame... a concert for the soul with a symphony orchestra... and the world is again insanely beautiful... until the next burn... (P. S. I don't know about you, but my favorite thing is to hang out with young people, not even necessarily young in body, but young in heart and soul 8~)
02/09/06, Romantic 84
So much Air in the head, so much Water in the eyes, so much Fire in the chest, so much crumbly Earth in the feet... Youth is constant discoveries. To cognize the higher Philosophy of the world order, to cognize oneself... To suffer and triumph at the same time. Partying with good old friends, searching for new sensations, spaces, fields. Acquaintance with new girls, sharply furious attitude, recklessly frantic reflection, still childish freshness of perception, already masculine firmness and self-confidence. A dizzying carousel of short T-shirts, bells, bottles of beer, long, long inflamed reckless evenings - and I, as part of it all. This is youth! I love......
12/12/06, Ruslan K.
A wonderful time when you are the most beautiful, the strongest, the most energetic, the most purposeful, the most optimistic, the most courageous in your life. What a pity it is that in this period a person is still so naive and has so little experience! I know that at a more mature age I will regret that in my youth I acted differently than it seemed to me then, but youth, alas, will no longer be possible to return.
12/01/07, Vitaminka
she left and will not return anymore, I still hear her steps, she was so slow when she left... My youth... stood and looked at me... My steps then were light, as if you were flying at the time of your youth, and this is not because your weight was lighter and the load of problems did not press on your shoulders. Just wings behind your back and rainbows in your eyes didn't let you crawl, didn't let you go, but you could only fly over the Earth and over your destiny. Youth - everything is possible, there is happiness, it cannot be absent, and sometimes there are depressions, but, believe me, the depressions of the young and "not young" differ to me like twilight differs from the hopeless darkness of the southern night. therefore, I really love the friends of my youth, they bring me back to that time (but we see each other, unfortunately, rarely). I really like to work with Young people, young in spirit, although of course there are still more young in spirit among young in body.
21/04/07, Romantic 84
A 15-year-old girl can be ugly only in spite of her age. A 25-year-old can be beautiful, too, only in spite of. These two sentences exhaustively define the significance of the concept of "youth". For Youth itself is the sister of Beauty. Even youth means fiery impulses, heightened feelings, touching habits, recklessness of pastimes. A frantic search for oneself in this world and glimpses of fateful audacity. That is, everything I live. All my MEANING. I can't imagine myself outside of this aesthetic. In short, live fast -- die yong!...
22/06/07, EXPERT
Each stage of life - a person has certain problems. They seem different, although, believe me, they are really similar! I'll tell you that I don't like my youth, right? And what happens?! Youth is not a virtue! Then dignity, probably old age?! Absurd!... When a person is young, he can do quite a lot! It's only begining! I want to do something, I want something else! The main thing - there is a choice! And everything else depends on the person himself! He wants to be young and successful or a drug addict in the alley ...
22/11/08, Sonya Scarlett
With pleasure I clutch at the elusive last moments of youth. It's time to get to know the world and realize your place in it. Everything for the first time. All you want to try. For the time being, you can do stupid tricks, and you can get away with them. And when it seems that you can throw the whole world at your feet. And everything is easier. And dreams come true. And the lightness of life.
27/04/10, Juliet87
Youth and childhood are the two coolest ages!!) Who wouldn’t go on saying something about young old people who are like “young at heart” and damn people, all this is nonsense! Old people are old people! Wise, boring, boring skeptics! And youth is beautiful and carefree, it happens once in a lifetime, it is drive, brightness of feelings, maximalism, freedom of emotions, in general, complete freedom and a sense of life as it is, a fresh optimistic and bold look at the world, the feeling that everything in it belongs to you and was created for you! Only we, the Young, are able to live and love to the fullest!) Youth, freshness, beauty!!! Yes!) The best time of life is childhood and youth, and all 50 year olds envy us, 20 year olds!!)) It's high to realize this!))) For me, youth is associated with a beautiful spring, and I want it to be eternal! And also America, the country of freedom, like spring, I also associate with youth, forever young America) youth is forever!
05/05/15, The robber from a fairy tale
For me, it started only at the age of 19... Real, independent from my parents, with the right to my own decisions and ambitions, mistakes and madness. The most driving period in my life. then everything goes to the brakes, brains and body swim fat. Although there are exceptions, who even at 40 look 25 and anneal through life so that my peers nervously smoke. And they are always their own in any youth company, there is always something to talk about with them, they always keep up with the times, no matter how much they knock. If I live to be forty, I hope to become just like that, otherwise - do not spoil my life with stagnation, degradation, stupid memories of old age and die before all this shit happens.
28/05/15, Andryukha2
Youth is cool) I, like the people on top, pissed off quite a lot, I was also addicted to video games. I sat at the computer clean for about a year and a half. After sitting ass like this, a psychological problem appeared called: Social phobia. Someday I will stop being a loser, which is what I wish the person from above :)
23/02/18, Black Prince
This is the most important and the most beautiful period in life. The time of transition from a child to an adult, mature person. When his interests, tastes, thoughts and feelings, his views on life, his own idea of right and wrong are formed. After all, it is at this time that a person becomes more independent, responsible, individual. As a rule, the most vivid memories that last a lifetime come from adolescence, the happiest period of life. Naivety, youthful courage, an indescribable feeling of the fullness of life, and the fact that you are "knee-deep sea", first love, first kiss, first sex - who doesn't know this? The most important thing is not to withdraw into oneself, not to try to hide from reality behind computer games, as some unsubscribed users did, but to use the opportunities that have appeared as fully as possible, so that later, being independent adults, not to regret the time spent in youth, but to recall with pleasure the happy moments of a wonderful time.
We publish a fragment from the book "Encyclopedia of Youth" - a joint autobiography of the writer Sergei Yurienen and philologist, philosopher Mikhail Epstein. Their friendship began in 1967, in the first year of the philological faculty of Moscow State University, and has continued for more than forty years, now in the USA. This is not just a double and dialogical autobiography, but an encyclopedia of the most mysterious, searching, passionate, tormenting, selfish, crisis, metaphysical age - youth. This is a dialogue of peers (E Yu), speaking from within youth - and at the same time about it, placing it in the perspective of subsequent life experience.
Youth: definitions
"Youth is retribution" Henrik Ibsen. At that time I did not know in what context Ibsen had this, but, as an epigraph to Blok's "Retribution", this saying haunted me with its vague rightness. I had two guesses.
1. Youth is a retribution for the serenity of childhood, the golden dreams of the unity of the “I” and the world and its all-good guardianship. Youth reveals a split in the foundation of the “I”, its sudden detachment, rootlessness neither in the family, nor in the family, nor in the house, the loneliness of wandering to nowhere.
2. Youth is a retribution for the old and mature, for those who have settled in their homes, bedrooms, cares and services, - and youth comes to ridicule, despise, question all this, take away the existential comfort from those who buried themselves alive.
It turned out that youth is retribution for childhood or retribution for the older generation. From the play "The Builder of Solnes" it is clear that the second, simplest interpretation is correct. Solnes. Youth is retribution. She is leading the revolution. As if under a new banner.
But even then, in my youth, I came to the third meaning: youth is retribution to herself. She torments and suffers, she imagines herself to be the heyday of life, the best age, the sharpest joy, but meanwhile it turns out to be the time of the most cruel torments. She chokes, falling to the cup of life, and at the same time she vomits and feels sick from overdrinking. Can't drink. From hunger all the time sucks in the pit of the stomach, but the stomach has not yet become tinned. Youth is a drinking bout 5-7-10 years long, which for others stretches for a lifetime. And at the same time it is an attack of vomiting, turning inside out to devastation, to an existential ulcer, heartburn and readiness for suicide. Chad, fumes, sleep of the mind and toothache in the heart.
But this was permanent extremism in everything. Although I reminded myself (in a broader sense): "Dostoevsky - but in moderation," however, half-measures could not be observed in anything. If reading (or playing cards), then before dawn, when it's time to get up and go to the faculty. If alcohol, then to complete amazement. If sex, then three days non-stop until complete zeroing. But if discipline, then to complete anchorage, experienced by me after the end of my relationship with Lena on Severnaya Street in Solntsevo.
Youth is not so much retribution. First of all, youth is a danger. Deadly and total threat. From all sides. From within. That's exactly what the stomachs are not yet tinned: how many times have miraculously saved me in hospitals. Infectious poisoning in a student canteen on Michurinsky, a month on Sokolina Gora (I ate pickles). After two courses, I brewed coffee in a 1953 tin teapot - gastric bleeding, lost two liters of blood. Deprived of conscious suicidal complexes, I cannot but mention here all the peers who did not survive their youth, suicides, all those who broke, drowned, crashed, as they say, “foolishly”, all those who unsuccessfully stormed their own limits. But outside too. How many times have they tried to kill me! Adults - for being young; peers - for dissimilarity, for otherness, and sometimes for no reason, just to catch up and experience also a very young joy of murder, thrusting a long German bayonet, or group football turning your head, so priceless, but only for you, into a crushed mass, incompatible with later life.
Being inside adolescence, I did not rule out that I would not survive it physically. Too unexpectedly and often, a thin film broke through, behind which quite serious, finally capital things awaited us, completely unprepared for this - death, non-being, nothing. Since then, it has never occurred to me to thank my fate, my demon, my guardian angel for not being without loss, but still taking me beyond the borders of that joyful and ferocious period, where in our peaceful times there were not so few peers left. So here it is: thanks angel.
Youth: metaphors
What would you compare youth to? Is there any image, symbol, emblem, metaphor that you could use to convey the peculiarity of this age?
In youth, everything is so sonorous, vociferous, and at the same time so vague, indefinite, scattered, that Gogol's image suggests itself: "the string rings in the fog." It's from the Notes of a Madman. But youth is a kind of madness, legitimized by biological nature and social custom. Anyone who does not go crazy in his youth, does not behave eccentrically, extremely, does not give himself up to passions, does not run away from home, does not make scandals, does not bring loved ones to fainting - he is considered really not quite normal, and all this is expressed by verbs with the prefix "re-": go crazy- calm down; will grind - flour will...
In my own experience, I would replace "fog" with "chad". Fog is cool and arises from the accumulation of ice crystals and water droplets in the air, while fumes are the result of fire, incomplete or improper combustion: acrid, suffocating smoke from damp firewood, unburned coal. Youth, of course, is not cold, but fiery, and that is why its vagueness is not fog, but waste. The mind is burning, the heart is burning, but this flame is difficult to connect with the substance of existence, still damp, green, and therefore produces waste, shreds the living and torments the lungs with suffocation. Whatever I hurriedly took on: writing a story, speaking at a seminar, personal relationships, political conversations, social and scientific projects - everything gave off some kind of fumes and brought suffocation, and I could not understand where this aftertaste of intoxication came from. After all, I am burning, why is the whole world not burning with the same pure flame? But he did not want to, resisted my fire. That's when you burn for several years, then the substance around you will dry up, to which you will gradually transfer the temperature of your body; and then it can burn with you easily and cleanly, warming the universe and not leaving stinking, black particles, shredded corpses of fiery violence. This is my metaphor - an amendment to Gogol's.
An exact, full-length metaphor that cancels all other, approximate ones ... Can I repeat after Kazakov - “blue and green”? I lack something inflamed and fiery in this spectrum. Whether to paraphrase Steinbeck (i.e. Shakespeare, "Richard III", now is the winter of our discontent…): « Spring our anxiety?
Anxiety is a stronger word than discontent - it’s quite appropriate here, because anxiety is a property of youth, which was also noticed in the Soviet thaw period by the sensitive tandem Pakhmutova / Oshanin - I mean “The Song of Anxious Youth” (1958), which worried me on the outskirts of youth: “And the snow, and the wind, and the night flight of stars ... my heart is calling me into the disturbing distance ... There is no doubt that the distance of youth turned out to be very disturbing, but the most existential closeness, the soul, alarmed much more strongly.
Youth and youth
How do we define youth within the boundaries of our lives, in what years? How does it differ from previous and subsequent ages? Is it different from youth?
In the schemes of scientific and psychological periodization, adolescence is usually defined as 17-21 years for boys and 16-20 years for girls. For myself, I would definitely add one more year before graduation: 17-22. But even 2-3 post-university years for me were still transitional from youth to youth. Actually, youth begins for me at the age of 25, with the creation of a family, and continues until about 30 years old, until the birth of the first children, when, also gradually, a state of maturity is established. So my youth - from 17 to 25, youth - from 22 to 30, each period of eight years, of which for three years they overlap each other, creating a gateway, a system of transitions. All these boundaries are conditional and make sense only in the psychodynamics of individual age development. Youth is a force that does not yet know what to do with itself, pokes its way into all corners and nooks and crannies, fills bumps, spends as much, if not more, than it acquires. Youth is a force that already knows what it needs to do with itself, or at least knows what it doesn't need to do, and my span of three years was precisely the transition from negative to positive knowledge. Youth is just as noisy, turbulent and wide-ranging in its changes, like youth, but it has a vector. The centrifugal movement of youth is replaced by a centripetal one, and the scattering of stones left by the previous generation is replaced by collecting one's own and building one's own house. When the house is more or less completed and there is someone to live in it, maturity begins.
The laws of gravity that form the pattern you suggested do not have the same attractive power in my case. I am a man of the Air, I do not build from stones. My image of the house is an air castle (in French - chateau d "Spain, again a castle, but - Spanish). And again, it was not by chance that ether lay in wait for me beyond the threshold of my youth - subversive, I mean. I succeeded so much in these airs that only by a miracle saved my literature and life from complete well-being in them.
Youth: her legacy
Who have we left from youth, what are the companions of life, thoughts, imagination? Who has not left us and whom we ourselves would not want to leave? And who and why have we discounted the most, peeled off the soul?
Since my youth, I have left very few close people with whom I still have external and internal communication. There are no others, and those are far away. You stayed. Ira Pankratova / Muravyova remained (although at the university we did not communicate much and became close only in America).
Valentin Evgenievich Khalizev, my supervisor, I rarely communicate with him, but I hold his image firmly in front of me. Olya Sedakova - there is no regular communication, but when we meet, I hear blood in her, the “chronosomes” of our generation, it is easy for us to understand each other, and the further, the more.
Andrey Bitov - I still appreciate communication with him and love what he wrote then, although I am less receptive to the next one. All other close people were acquired either relatedly, earlier, or later in friendship, in youth and maturity.
As for the companions of thought and imagination, Plato, Montaigne, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Bakhtin remained forever, admiration for A. Solzhenitsyn remained, but the passion for “left” and “new left” thinkers such as Sartre and Marcuse faded away, and the brilliant Nabokov also began to interest me less, as well as the literary and artistic avant-garde.
It seems that thanks to my third marriage, I jumped out of my generation - twenty years ago. In addition, interpersonal relationships by this point have almost completely virtualized. I can’t say that I have cooled off, let alone fallen into misanthropy and ceased to be “greedy for people.” But in this sense, the supposedly "live" magazine, LJ, fully satisfies the need for communication. With other people who are not indifferent and dear to me - and they are all “far away” - like the writer Anatoly Kurchatkin, my first publisher - communication is again computer-based. Even with his younger brother - a graduate of the Mekhmat of Moscow State University and an eyewitness to his elder brother's Moscow youth. Even with my mother - at 88, my mother is still quite an eyewitness.
If we talk about those who are not close, but those with whom he was friends, met and simply neighbored in the Main Building of Youth, - some left the track prematurely (in Ivdel, the starting point of his transatlantic "journey" - he worked in Peru and Cuba - Yura Tokarev died; Andryusha Vanenkov, mentally broken by Bratislava, disappeared without an echo; both wonderful polyglots-native ki); others, I hope, are well, but quite silently. My reputation as a defector writer, broadcasting on shortwave in the name of Svoboda itself, protected me from excessive communication under Soviet rule; apparently, this reputation continues to exert its influence in the new conditions of electronic surveillance, and this is understandable - our generation in its average mass and in its youth was very circumspect and prudent, what can we say now, when it enters the “third age” marked by conservatism ... But sometimes anonymous sounds are heard from there, by which I state: the “silent majority” of the generation is alive. With others that appear in the same LiveJournal, I myself prefer not to enter into relationships, because I remember their sinuous-reptilian Komsomol-career youth - "boys-what-if-you-will."
Direct meetings have become generally rare - and here, in America, from the contemporaries of my youth, I meet live, perhaps only with you.
And you are one of the “companions of thought and imagination” that I have saved: I continue to read you.
As well as Norman Mailer, by the way - he died when I was already in America and just discovered the place where he was born; Marina and I often go there, in the town blown and washed by the Atlantic, we make the “Moss mile” along the boardwalk, sunbathe, swim, swim; and his books are always with us.
However, it is easier for me to list those whom I have stopped reading. While I follow the current world literature, especially Russian, American, to a lesser extent French, I - to some extent retaining Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Hemingway - have lost interest in a number of magnetic names of youth: Faulkner, Gide, Cortazar, Camus, Sartre, Celine, Nabokov ... retaining, of course, a grateful memory "of how it was for the first time."
Fedor Mikhailovich, Lev Nikolaevich? They have become so inward, so integrated into my composition, that it seems mecum porto, even for years without removing it from the shelf.
As for pure philosophizing, in this respect philosophy decisively gave way to esotericism.
Youth: loss
What are our biggest losses since our youth? Can and should they be returned?
Perhaps all the best that was in my youth later remained with me or returned to me: discoveries of love, friendship, faiths, books, artistic and mental worlds, the joy of knowledge, wandering, meetings. Of course, I would not refuse to revive the feeling of "first-timer" with which I entered your much more adult world; the recognition and empathy with which I read A. Bitov, Yu. Kazakov, V. Aksenov; the admiration with which he discovered V. Nabokov and A. Solzhenitsyn; those life-opening conversations that he had with Sasha Bokuchava, and funny and cheerful conversations with Sasha Nikolaev. Those secrets that suddenly shone in women's faces. Those free wanderings around people, that unpredictability in meetings that could turn into new love or friendship, maybe for life. But I also remember that over time, all this openness began to turn into emptiness, heaviness and even despair. And therefore, my gratitude to youth does not arouse in me the desire to repeat it, to be in the place of that youth who greedily absorbed the world around him and with his greed often ruined what he had to keep clean from himself.
I can observe the younger generation among my American students, which means that it differs from ours not only in history, but also in geography, and the ground for comparison slips away. It seems to me that the metaphor of a string ringing either in a fog or in a frenzy does not apply to them at all. Young Americans begin to integrate into professional and social structures much earlier than we do, and they do not have such confusion, erosion, as in our youth, especially as our free tribe of philologists had (and there is no combined philology here as a discipline, there are separate linguistics and literary studies). They give themselves - sometimes between school and university, but more often between university and graduate school or further careers - a year or two, when they "live to live", gain experience real life. But this is precisely a conscious, planned sewerage youth in the gap between the steps of a career. They cannot be blamed for this, because the density of social life and the tightness of the professional ranks here are incomparably higher than in the USSR, where socialization was imposed from the outside, superficial, and that is precisely why it prolongs youth from the inside, justifies its idleness, vacillation, mediocrity, aimless dispersion. You can envy the local youth in almost everything, and wish only for a greater breadth of thinking, bypassing the professional cells. But if this good wish can be fulfilled only at the price of slipping into a formless, carbon monoxide, bohemian spirit, then it is better not to be fulfilled.
From my youth, I have retained a desire for the big, the great, some kind of gigantomania, which actually interferes with specialization and success in the field of specific disciplines. Deep down in my heart I don’t feel like a philologist, or a philosopher, or a culturologist (although these specializations are too broad) and I don’t know who I am at all, although I interfere little by little in everything, including linguistics and even psychology. I have defined this for myself as the field of "humanities", but I am constantly trying to expand it with new disciplines, which I myself produce as needed. This can be seen as the influence of the utopian Russian, messianic Jewish or collectively Soviet utopian messianic mentality, which sought to resolve all issues on a "world scale". But this can not be thrown off for time and origin, but attributed only to oneself and considered juvenile. I still scatter the same way, working on dozens of projects in parallel and alternating them sometimes within the same day. And in each area, I am only concerned with the world, the global, the turning point and the upheaval. Adults usually don't behave like that, they finish one thing and only then start another, and they focus on the details, go deeper into particular issues. If my youth was infantile, then maturity, turning into old age, is juvenile, such is the lag in phase. Probably, I would like to acquire more adulthood, empiricism, specialization, but not at the expense of the youthful "everything" - but now it's too late.
young man
I Misha
“I” sticks out of the young man so much that it is just right to rename “youth” into “yness” (I-ness), and the young man into young man. I-burden is really a heavy burden both for myself and for others. In adolescence, the “I” is already awakening from the dreams of childhood, already finding itself in a bitter feud with the world, but it is still so timid, bashful, lonely, squeezed or driven into itself that I want to sympathize with it, patronize, stroke the poor shorn head. And you can’t stroke the young man anymore - he is with a revolver. The difference is like between Ilyusha Snegirev in The Brothers Karamazov and Ippolit Terentyev in The Idiot. And it doesn't matter if this revolver shoots bullets, thoughts, words, at itself or at others, it is a weapon. Yanost is the most criminal, terrorist age, when the strength of the janos is already almost equal to that of an adult, and the experience is still almost equal to that of a teenager. This divergence of strength and experience, the ability to remake the world without understanding and respect for the world, for things-in-themselves and people-for-themselves, is the source of juvenile crime, aggression against the world order.
By upbringing and character, I was a rather meek young man, but the “I” of me was like a pearl, especially in the first year, when I suddenly saw how much I lagged behind my peers in terms of male development, and decided to immediately catch up and overtake them. Perhaps the most disgusting memory of my life is when our group or course was sent to the Novy Arbat (1967), which was then under construction, to clean something, to sweep on the upper floors of skyscrapers. There, among the dry leaves, mice rustled, and since I had a shovel in my hands, with a sudden joy of bitterness, I began to hit the animals with it and bloodied, and maybe even killed several. For some reason, it suddenly occurred to me that these small pests should be attacked with a mousetrap, a cat, or, at worst, a shovel. Of course, this mouse fight was happening in front of the girls and for some reason it had to portray how tough and courageous I am. Perhaps, at the age of 11-12, such vile “coolness” could still be understood, but I was 17! The very next day I thought about it with shame. And recently, at a bus stop in Moscow, a kid of five or six years old began to stomp on ants that had paved their way along the asphalt, and very carefully press them down with his frisky leg. I made a remark to him, one, two, three, all the more insistent, and then his mother got scared, deciding that I was crazy and dangerous, and took him away from me. This anger, as I now understand, was related not so much to the baby, but to himself, who once crushed mice with a shovel. And, of course, it's not just about mice - these were the years of some kind of hysterical compensatory "superhumanity" from which I myself suffered, as from stuffiness, stuffiness, isolation of my "I". When I read Nietzsche's exaltations: "why am I so smart", "why am I so strong", etc., I sometimes recognize this intoxication-I-ness of delayed "energy", which overflowed for 30 and 40 years and finally broke his mind.
Then, in my youth, I doubted the commandment "Love your neighbor as yourself." Not because "love" - that was certain. But because my attitude towards myself could hardly be called love, and I did not understand how to learn from it a lesson and a model of love for others. I understood and did not understand myself, I was afraid, I loved, yes, I loved, but I also despised, and hated, and was surprised at myself, and yearned for myself. Yes, my mother would not love someone like me if she knew me from the inside! However, I would love it. After all, when my daughter was born, I also changed this commandment: "Love your neighbor as your child." And then, in fact, he could be guided by her and love some previously unloved people, representing them as children.
I, Seryozha
To begin with, I myself have never addressed myself by my first name. Of course, I got used to it, but I don't really like it. So what if it's Roman generic? And the fact that this is Pushkin's patronymic does not justify him. Moreover, it was compromised by Yesenin: not that I was an opponent of his poetry, but I did not want to evoke associations related to his way of life and death. When I chose freedom in France, they did not yet know about political correctness, and in the prefecture they renamed me Serge. It was more convenient for the French, but also for me: no connotations, except to say that offensive un beau Serge, "handsome Serge"1 - how the older generation of Frenchmen of both sexes almost automatically reacted.
However, in the days of my youth, only Aurora, the author of the attached picture, called me Serge. For others, I was or Sergey - it's a shame, because it's tight and sharp, like a trigger (because gay did not yet know en masse) - or as this subchapter of mine is called, but it had only a conditional relation to that trembling of will, fear and hope, to that excitement of being / non-being that filled that young man old times- as we can safely say. All he wanted to do was write. All that was expected from life was love. All that I was afraid to even hope for was freedom. Well, the favor of fortune is all that I hoped for. Sometimes, on the heavenly floors of Moscow State University, I looked out the window at the rain, and my reflection in the glasses split into two, showing me a double with the same name, and, leaving the world of dreams, I remembered that this is how it is, that in fact I am Sergey Sergeevich.
At that time, I did not yet know about the mystical-occult belief that if one of his relatives dies at the birth of a person, the energy of the deceased multiplies the vitality of the newborn.
Youth: lessons and a view from here
Do we love our youth, and what is in it, and what do we not love and do not accept?
You can't say that I love my youth. More precisely, I do not like myself in it - but I love much of what she sent me and with what she brought me together. Of all the ages, I least of all accept myself as I was in my youth, for me it was the most spiritually difficult age. Cruelty in trying to be strong; insensitivity in an attempt to inspire and evoke feelings; pride in an attempt to know and embody one's "I"; gluttony in an attempt to satisfy the hunger for impressions and sensations. Perhaps my childhood was too long, I entered my youth a few years late, and it was complicated for me by adolescence that had not been fully experienced, with its critical, crisis worldview. To the sufferings of young Werther, the sufferings and temptations of Dostoevsky's adolescents were added.
I am ambivalent about many things in my youth. I regret that I was furious - and that I didn’t go crazy enough: the lifestyle that you led in the hostel remained inaccessible to me in my home shell, and therefore the relapses of youth, like illnesses, overtook me later (although it is more likely that a person who is bogged down in such a lifestyle, then it is more difficult to get out of it). And most of all, I value three things in my youth: the sacrament of love and friendship, and the fact that loved ones and friends treated me more generously and more tolerantly than I deserved; the joy of work, mental concentration, free choice of topics and directions of thought; that through folklore expeditions and summer trips, I discovered the village, the people, the songs, the vast world of people unlike myself.
My youth didn't really know what they were doing. There is a French saying Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait - and, by the way, Tolstoy mentions it in his Youth. The second half of the proverb is not yet fully relevant for us, we are still capable of some deeds, while the first half is “If only youth knew” ...
If my youth knew what I know now ... There is a temptation to say: probably - and not probably, but of course! without any doubt! - many of my "choices", in Sartre's expression, would be different. The very quality of relations with those whom I loved would be different: after all, I would “know”, secured by the experience of mistakes. These are the "correct", or rather, corrected elections , according to the "butterfly effect", would have resulted in a completely different history of Jurjenen than the one that remained in his irreparably stormy youth against the backdrop of a stagnant era. Would I risk living an alternative history, "another life"? With all its super-barrier mood - perhaps in the imagination. But the regret that formed this saying is nonetheless with me. And at least this already proves the inconsistency of the half-conscious conviction that possessed me in my youth - that I, in spite of all mankind, having in mind the historically dead, live my only, unique life correctly.
instead of a conclusion. youth and metaphysics
There is such a discipline - developmental psychology, which studies the psychosocial characteristics of each age. What is inherent in one age, looks like an anomaly for another. It is absurd for a child to look like an old man, and for an old man to look like a child. Usually youthful creativity is characterized as "immature" in terms of professional samples. But after all, each age can be considered as a special cultural formation that lives according to its own stylistic laws. The youthful poems of almost all poets are inferior to their adult creations, but if we consider them not from a professional literary point of view, but as examples of youthful culture, they deserve special attention. In this book, we are trying to understand youth as a special cultural and psychological formation - not through research and generalizations, but from the inside, on the experience of our own youth, while simultaneously contemplating it from our different age distance, from a distance of forty years.
Contrary to the established opinion about a “beautiful and happy” youth, this is a difficult and painful time when a person discovers his alienation to the world, difficult compatibility with it, goes through doubts about his own value, through a painful experience of dislike for himself, which is sometimes compensated by the delirium of unrecognized or future greatness. Youth is a dream and a force that does not know what to do with itself and how to apply it to reality, and therefore languishes without a goal and constantly looks back at itself. This is eccentricity mixed with egocentrism, an attempt to break out of the circle of the established and generally accepted with the inevitable abutment in - and repulsion from - oneself. Here is the exact portrait of youth given by Leo Tolstoy in the very first chapter of the story of the same name: “Outside of teaching, my occupations consisted: in solitary incoherent dreams and reflections, in doing gymnastics, in order to become the first strong man in the world, in walking without any definite goal and thought through all the rooms, and especially the corridor of the girl’s room and looking at myself in the mirror, from which, however, I always departed with a heavy feeling of despondency and even from rotation." Incoherent dreams, wandering without a goal, the accumulation of strength and looking at oneself (and, of course, girlish) - this is Tolstoy's formula of youth.
Henrik Ibsen gave an exact and ambiguous formula for this age: "Youth is retribution." This definition is correct in three senses. Firstly, youth is a retribution to the adult settled world, the values of which it challenges and blows up with its impatience, maximalism. Secondly, youth is a retribution for the young themselves, a terrible discovery of one's loss in a world that until recently was so adapted to the serene fairy tales and myths of childhood. Thirdly, youth is a retribution to the world as a whole, for the fact that it does not understand and does not love me, it is jealousy, irritability, sometimes anger even towards friends, lovers, reality as such.
Youth is the most nutritious age for any radicalism, extremism, terrorism; this is the most criminogenic age - and at the same time favorable to terror against oneself, suicide. Youth, unlike childhood and adolescence, already has strength, but unlike maturity and old age, there is no experience yet. Strength without experience is susceptible to chimeras, temptations of destruction and radical alteration of being. Youth is carried away by the ideas of transforming the world, because the world is not yet dear to her, she has not got used to it, and she has already gained strength to defeat it. Youth is often carried away by broadcasting ideas based on dislike for the existing world: totalitarian, fascist, communist ideas - and becomes the backbone of such regimes. According to Mayakovsky, "communism is the youth of the world, and it must be built by the young." Therefore, the totalitarian government from time to time arranges “purges” or “cultural revolutions” (Stalin, Mao Zedong) for the sake of generational change, in order to destroy the elders and elevate the young, and thereby raise strength over experience, the idea - over being.
The happiness and misfortune of our youth is that it fell on old age, the end of the 1960s - the beginning of the 1970s. It fell to us to be young in the era of decrepitude of communism. While we were growing up, everything around us was rapidly decaying: ideas, leaders, values, morals, the system itself, which turned 50 years old in the year we entered the university (1967). Therefore, our youth did not have access to social action, we were mortally bored in the society of "mature" (and already "overripe") socialism. The sluggish pace of the surrounding life lagged behind the biologically accelerated rhythms of youth, and we did not know what to do with ourselves in this inert or, as they later began to say, "stagnant" state of society. Youth is the rapids of time, when it flows with special speed and pressure, and we are caught in timelessness. This was our misfortune.
But it also turned out to be a rare success. For the first time in the history of the totalitarian 20th century, a generation has grown up that, with its youth, rejected the “youth of the world”, refused to participate, fight and be inspired. This generation broke the connection of communist times, the continuity of Soviet generations. The previous generation, the “sixties”, born in the thirties, was still carried away by the revolutionary project, still sang of the “Island of Freedom” and the “Bratsk hydroelectric power station”. The next generation, the eighties, which consisted of the children of "glasnost and perestroika", had already moved from the Komsomol to commerce, had already mastered, in the range from pragmatism to cynicism, the values of the market.
Our generation, having fled from the advanced "constructions of the century", hung in a pause between two epochs of offensive social action: from capitalism to communism - and back from communism to capitalism. We found ourselves in a no man's land, a neutral zone, where, as you know, "flowers of extraordinary beauty." We have come to the era of retreat as representatives of a new species - "a man who capitulates." “Retreating, a person learns to recognize his minimum, his limit. The limit of man is you, man! Retreating man. Homo capitularens,” ended my 1971 diary.
We are the generation in between, when all that was left to do was listen to the absurd ticking of the clock on the frozen dial of time. This was luck: to crawl into the crack between two historical epochs and hear silence, hear the conversation of the great and eternal, not drowned out by the noise of fast-flowing time. Social stagnation had its own depth, its own star-filled abyss. Timelessness is a parodic monument to eternity.
It does not follow from this that our youth was distinguished by high morality or creative productivity. There were generations that were much more cultured, well-read, smart, gifted, determined, and productive. But there was something that distinguished us from at least two previous and two subsequent generations: an interest in metaphysics. I would even say: the necessity of metaphysics, experienced in our own skin, because we tried to jump out of the historical skin of our time - and put on something else, more subtle, sensitive and durable. By metaphysics, I mean far more than philosophy and its most speculative section, the doctrine of the basic principles and principles of the universe. Metaphysics is not only in philosophy, but also in literature, in history, war, painting, theater, in the family, in everyday life, in money, even in sports. Metaphysics is an interest in the stable, eternal, timeless foundations, structures, and purposes of any experience or activity, be it politics, literature, or cooking. Previous generations lived in the grip of historicism, they politicized all problems, including metaphysical ones, and tried to solve them with social action. This is true not only of the Soviet, but also of the Western generations of the 1910s-1960s, including our peers from the "first" world. For the first time in several decades, our generation in the USSR developed a taste for metaphysics, a metaphysical thirst, and in this we, through the heads of all the revolutionary and post-revolutionary, pre-war, military and post-war generations of 1910-1960, echoed the generation of Russian philosophers, idealists, symbolists, existentialists of the early 20th century. And through them - with German and English romantics, American transcendentalists, French symbolists. We didn’t know that much about them, we were far, half a century behind our Western peers in terms of reading, but metaphysical thirst is not born by books, it searches for and selects them itself, and we eagerly read everything that we managed to get in samizdat, tamizdat, thenizdat (pre-revolutionary publications) and spetsizdat (short-circulation publications for a narrow circle of specialists and ideological workers).
Traces of this metaphysical thirst, the "eternal" approach to everything from academic subjects to romantic feelings, from everyday trifles to life and professional vocation, are scattered throughout this book. This is her style and understanding of youth as the most metaphysical time, when the awareness of life as a whole is born, when even the most private, personal, practical questions reveal their metaphysical underside. It remains only to thank our stagnant time for the fact that, having driven us into a historical dead end, it allowed us to fulfill the calling of youth: to comprehend the world as a whole without a hasty attempt to remake it, to bend it for ourselves.
The gripping autobiography of Rupert Mountjoy is nothing less than the story of a wealthy young Englishman whose adolescence and youth passed first away from the noise of the capital, and then among the cream of London's high society at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. This narrative gives the modern reader a glimpse into the era when the offspring of aristocratic families could devote all their time (both day and night!) exclusively to the search for pleasure. Rupert Mountjoy describes the details of his own Sybarite life quite frankly, what is called "without cuts", thereby adding weight to the arguments of those historians who claim that at that time, under the rigid oppression of public morality, a powerful stream of sexual energy seethed and often burst out.
Now we know that then the representatives of the upper strata of society ignored the puritanical morality of the church (which, by the way, was at that time a much more influential social force than it is now), and what dangers were fraught with sexual pleasures. So from Rupert's diary we learn how violently the school priest, Mr. Clark, spoke out against such a harmless thing as masturbation. And how Rupert and his pals ignored this and all other warnings about carnal sins, and how prim social morality was often challenged by members of both the upper and lower strata of society.
Rupert is happy to describe his hedonistic lifestyle - copious morning meals after a long wake-up call, leisurely reading sports magazines in some elite club, and finally attending a formal reception or one of the theaters of the West End. Well, after that, together with friends, you can relax in one of the cozy "intimate meeting places", picking up a pretty girl for every taste. Perhaps such a daily routine would appeal to the vast majority of young people of the same age as Rupert, but living a hundred years later. However, to their great regret, they have neither time nor money for this.
In addition, it is worth noting that this is not the only publication that tells about the adventures of Rupert Mountjoy. Shortly before his angry father forced him to make a hasty trip to distant Australia after rumors that were unpleasant to the family about a certain purchase of three racehorses in the autumn of 1913, Rupert directed his lawyers from the well-known firm of Godfrey, Alan and Coley to "make as much financial benefit as possible from my notes." David Goffrey, known to the regulars of English clubs as far from a puritan, immediately sold Rupert's "creation" to the editor of an underground magazine published by the notorious Cremonite brotherhood. The fee received for the manuscript completely satisfied Rupert's most persistent creditors.
The Cremonites were a semi-underground gathering of inveterate rakes, among whom were such people as the financier and personal friend of King Edward VII Sir Ronnie Dunn, writer and artist Max Dalmain, Captain of the Royal Guard Alan Brooke and Dr. Jonathan Letchmore, who will appear more than once on the pages of this book. Thus, this fact makes one wonder: was Rupert Mountjoy himself somehow connected with this society? By the way, it owes its name to one of the oldest Chelsea parks - Cremon Garden. This park had a very bad reputation and was closed in the 80s of the XIX century after numerous complaints of public disorder, which often escalated into outright fights on King's Road after the bars closed. And it was there that prostitutes most often sought and found clients for themselves, in fact, as in Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus. Many believed that the Cremonites were just some kind of secular society. In fact, their headquarters in Mayfair was known as the favorite haunt of idle upper-class people, where their orgies were held in complete secrecy, which happened to be attended by high-ranking officials of the state.
Rupert's entries appeared in the Cremonite Quarterly until 1917. Copies of these notes, transported to the fronts of the First World War, most likely evoked pleasant memories among officers and privates who faced the horrors of the great war face to face.
Fortunately for Rupert, he himself was at this time thousands of miles away from that terrible confrontation that was destined to end the Sybarite luxury of the Edwardian age. From the letters of Rupert Mountjoy to friends and acquaintances, it is clear that our illustrious author was eager to get into the army, but wise people persuaded him to stay at home. In addition, his fiancee Nancy de Booth, whom he met immediately after his arrival in Australia, played a big role in this. Yes, and in Sydney he was lucky, despite the fact that his father, Colonel Mountjoy, sending his son to a distant country, provided him with only a one-way ticket and a check for two thousand pounds sterling. Rupert invested this money in the creation of the men's club Odbodz, housed in a wonderful mansion off Pitt Street in the heart of Sydney. This club appeared to be very similar to the famous Cremonite establishment, and within a few years, although Rupert was already charging a hundred guineas a year as a membership fee, there were more than enough applicants to join the club.
A few months after the November 1918 armistice, a second, unauthorized edition of Rupert's early diaries appeared. An edition was issued in Manchester by the Venus and Priapus Society, about which little is known. Historians now speculate that such a society never existed at all, but was merely a front for publishing all sorts of shocking pamphlets, probably created by Oswald Knuckleberry of Didsbury, great-nephew of Ivor Lazenby, famous writer and publisher of the underground erotic novel classics Pearls and Oysters.
In 1921, Rupert and his family (in 1915 he married Nancy and in five years they had three children - two twin boys and a girl) again changed their place of residence and settled on a ranch in Southern California. In a letter to his old friend Sir David Goughrey, Rupert complained about the Sydney policemen who were demanding too much money from him to turn a blind eye to everything that was going on at the Odbods Club. In sunny California, the family lived a quiet and peaceful life. Rupert and Nancy lived to a very respectable age on their ranch, located near the ultra-modern Beverly Hills area.
Perhaps even today, Rupert Mountjoy's uncomplicated narrative will seem somewhat shocking to someone. However, as one of the leading scholars of the British erotic novel of the turn of the century, Webster Newington, said, “It should be remembered that many underground publications of the time indicate that all the taboos that existed at that time were constantly being questioned. And it was precisely this skeptical attitude towards them that contributed to a freer understanding of one's own needs and desires, and ultimately to the diversity of views on the relationship of the sexes, characteristic of the 90s of the XX century.
Authors like Rupert Mountjoy firmly opposed the popular belief that sexuality is an area of human life that should be tightly controlled by the ruling establishment. It is wonderful that his notes have survived to this day and are being republished almost a hundred years after their appearance, to acquaint us with an unconventional, unbiased look at the manners and mores of a bygone era.
Warwick Jackson, Birmingham, February 1992
I know that youth is gone
That the first experiments are behind,
But I'm back there again
Where they were so stormy.
Rupert Mountjoy London, September 1913
"No, no. I already know. I know that youth is over. Now I can only remember. And I remember: then and there, in my youth, I did not feel happy. It seemed to me the opposite: that everything is complicated, they don’t understand me, they don’t hear me. But now I know that there was happiness there and then. And then I didn’t know anything.
What was I waiting for then? And I was waiting for myself an amazing fate, a unique life ... How I wanted to feel everything, try everything and as soon as possible. Then I could walk down the street, be reflected in the shop windows and could strongly hope that they would definitely love me, that they were waiting for me. And I could also think sweetly until morning and feel with trepidation that just about ... this morning ... soon ... soon ...
And there, in my youth, when I looked at the morning fog over the river and returned home in the morning through the still sleeping city, it always seemed to me, or rather, I was sure that my name was exactly me ... exactly me ... "
Translation of the lyrics of the song At dawn - voices are calling me
"No, no. I already know. I know that youth is over. Now I can only remember. And I remember then and there, in my youth, I felt happy. I thought the opposite: that it"s complicated, I don"t understand, can"t hear me. But now I know that then and there was happiness. And then I knew nothing. But I just wanted! I waited then for something! And I thought I heard my name...
But what did I expect then? I was expecting amazing destiny, a unique life... As I wanted to feel, to try everything and as soon as possible. Then I could walk down the street, reflected in the shop and would strongly hope that I will love that is waiting for me. And I could till the morning is sweet to think with awe to feel that... this morning... soon... soon...
And there, in my youth, when I looked at morning mist over the river and was returning home at dawn through the still sleeping city, I always thought, or rather, I was sure that name is me... me..."
Sonnet 151
Youth does not know the conscience of reproaches, Like love, even though conscience is the daughter of love. And you do not expose my vices Or call yourself to account. I am devoted to you, I surrender myself entirely to simple and rude passions. My spirit slyly seduces the body, And the flesh celebrates its victory. At your name, she seeks to point out the goal of her desires, rises like a slave before her queen, to fall at her feet again. Who knew in love, ups and downs, The depths of conscience are familiar to him. Translation by S.Ya. Marshak All translations by Samuil Marshak Love is a child and consciousness is alien to it, Although, everyone knows, it is the fruit of love. So do not reproach me, leave grumbling, Otherwise you will be guilty. After all, I cheated on me for treason, And my spirit, heeding the calls of the powerful body, He lost victory in love. What does the body care about sin? And, awakening at your name, It chose you as a reward, Proud at the thought of being your slave, He is both life and death with you in joy ... I am aware of the irresistible power of Love and with it I am ready to live and fall. Translation by M.I. Tchaikovsky All translations by Modest Tchaikovsky Love is so young, and where does she know what - conscience! But who does not know, friend, her birth story! So you do not reproach me for my sins, so as not to fall into the same haste. Your betrayal, friend, not infrequently makes And change the poor me for the flesh: The soul peaces her in love to triumph, And - miserable - she just wants it. And now she, having risen at your name, Points to everyone at your face with triumph, Content to be your slave And serve you in every possible way by herself. Well - why do I call that "love", whose love That lifts my spirit, then forces me to fall again! Translation by N.V. Gerbel All translations by Nikolai Gerbel Love is too young to become Conscious, even though there is a grain of consciousness in it. Therefore, there is no need for censure, O dear, otherwise you will find yourself guilty again. You seduce me. And I? I am myself. My soul broadcasts that, loving, The flesh can become happy. And you know, Enough of her bait and such! At your name she cheers up And rushes at you as if she were a prey; You are ready to sacrifice yourself. It was not a lack of conscience that made Me call love what I praised. Translation by A.M. Fedorova Love is young - her conscience is torment Unknown, even though she was born. So do not reproach me for sins, so that there is no fault on you either. You involve the body in the sin of treason, I involve the soul in this sin. The soul is obedient, the flesh decides boldly, That success is always ready for her in love. Rising arrogantly at your name, She exercises her power, So that later, humbly and humbly, before you, an obedient slave to fall. Do not reproach that conscience is alien to me: I am always glad to rise and fall in love. Translation by A.M. Finkel
Original text in English
Sonnet 151
Love is too young to know what conscience is, Yet who knows not conscience is born of love? Then gentle cheater urge not my amiss, Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove. For thou betraying me, I do betray My nobler part to my gross body"s treason, My soul doth tell my body that he may, Triumph in love, flesh stays no farther reason, But rising at your name doth point out thee, As his triumphant prize, proud of this pride, He is contented your poor drudge to be, To stand in your affairs, fall by your side. No want of conscience hold it that I call, Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.
