Mishka Yaponchik is a legend of the underworld. Part 1. Isaac Babel. Benya Krik and everything, everything, everything …
Thanks to the mass media, the whole country became well aware of the name of the Black Sea gangster, the legend of the underworld, the storm of the Odessa bourgeoisie, the defender of the poor and the "expropriator of the expropriators" Mishka Yaponchik.
Truth then for some reason necessarily triumphs. For some reason, sure.
But for some reason it is necessary later.
(Alexander Volodin, Soviet playwright)
Thanks to the mass media, the whole country became well aware of the name of the Black Sea gangster, the legend of the underworld, the storm of the Odessa bourgeoisie, the defender of the poor and the "expropriator of the expropriators" Mishka Yaponchik.
In the 19th century, the Odessa poet and friend of Alexander Sergeevich VI Tumansky said that "Pushkin gave the city a letter of immortality." Isaac Babel created his undying legend. Odessa - the "incomparable city" - gave Russian literature "incomparable literature". For her, even a name was invented: the South Russian school. Isaac Babel in Russian literature is called the successor of the genre of the short story, the heir of the short stories by Chekhov and Bunin.
In general, Odessa writers were able to see in the primitive and negative characters of their works a special zest, to give them such attractiveness that they truly became heroes for all times, who are quoted and imitated to this day. Odessa is a city of estuaries, chestnuts, writers and legends.
Once Leonid Utesov, who knew Babel well and clearly sympathized with Moisey Vinnitsky (Mishka Yaponchik), who extended his touching urethral-visual concern to the creative intelligentsia of the city, joked that everyone would like to be born in Odessa, but not everyone succeeded. A Muscovite, Londoner, and even a Madrid citizen can envy the special attitude of Odessa residents to their city. The fact that Odessa, a city by the Black Sea, is special, was told by the same Leonid Osipovich, and Vladimir Vysotsky confidently supported him:
They say that the
Queen from Nepal was here
And some big lord from Edinburgh, And from here much closer
To Berlin and Paris, Than even from St. Petersburg itself …
As they like to say in the emigrant environment, there are no former residents of Odessa. “They are now smeared with a thin layer all over the globe,” joked Mikhail Zhvanetsky. The landscape features impress the guests of the resort town, but the most interesting thing about it is the people.
The life of many famous Odessa residents is shrouded in mystery, embellished with myths, overgrown with fiction, like the bottom of a scow is overgrown with shell rock. In Odessa, on Malaya Arnautskaya, you will certainly be shown the basement, into which Gleb Zhiglov, during the filming of "Meeting Place …" in the voice of Vysotsky, called out: "And now Humpbacked!" Well, a memorial plaque with the inscription: “In this house was born and spent a trampled childhood“the king of thieves Odessa”Mishka Yaponchik” - they are ready to present a newcomer in every yard of a Moldavian woman, sincerely indignant “for her absence”: “Shaw, again? From the vile tourists again bought souvenirs."
Isaac Babel, perpetuating the memory of the urethral Odessa Robin Hood Moishe Yakovlevich Vinnitsky, created in his Odessa Stories a charming image of the romantic raider Benny Crick. Naturally, the bandit, even if he died as a red commander, could not be put on the same level with the bright, ideologically consistent faces of the heroes of the works of the era of socialist realism, and they preferred to keep silent about him.
However, fulfilling a social order to create a literary work of the time of the intervention, where the behavior of heroes and characters was to be filled with negativism, the writer shifted the accents, did not calculate and, to put it mildly, exaggerated the colors, giving the image of the Odessa mafia such charm and charm that he overshadowed everyone literary heroes of the times of the revolution and the Civil War.
An anal-visual writer with sound, complementary to urethral values, could not help but admire Mishka Yaponchik. Just like the future king of Odessa bandits, he was born in Moldavanka and knew well the life and manners of this part of the city, where thieves' raspberries, cheap taverns, brothels, visiting houses were concentrated … The police did not pry their noses here unnecessarily, and they knew about her every appearance in advance.
Here, after another daring escape, pursued by "dragons" (policemen), Grigory Kotovsky, a Bessarabian raider, sat out. Here, whole dynasties of thieves, gamblers, and bugbears passed down the skills of their criminal craft from generation to generation. The Higher Thieves' School of Moldavanka trained personnel not only for Odessa-mother and other cities of the Russian Empire, but also for export.
Marquis de Sade of the Russian Revolution
So, reading his books, they called Isaac Babel in the Russian émigré environment of Paris, Brussels, Berlin … former compatriots. The Marquis de Sade believed that "violence does not contradict human nature, and man is only material for terror of all kinds." Babel's stories were liked by everyone: both white and red. Marina Tsvetaeva highly appreciated them. Isaac Emmanuilovich met with her and other representatives of the Russian creative emigre intelligentsia, scattered throughout Europe, having a clear order from the Cheka - to persuade the voluntary refugees to return.
In addition, after living for a year in Paris, Babel, after a long spat, restored relations with his ex-wife Eugenia (angel Zhenechka), who had long emigrated to France. They even had a daughter, Natasha. Yevgenia refused Isaac Emmanuilovich's offer to return to Soviet Russia. Babel himself did not see any literary perspective for himself outside his homeland. The émigré bread was too meager and bitter. Isaac Emmanuilovich had before him the example of Gorky, who also lived abroad, whose works were no longer published, in connection with which the world famous writer found himself in a difficult financial situation.
The “Russian petrel” did its job: he stirred up the old society, calling for a revolution that changed the world, reshaped the territory of Europe, and became of no interest to anyone in the West. His works have lost their relevance. Times have changed. Other political forces entered the game, with different ideology and morality.
The researchers of Gorky's biography argue that it was Babel who managed to persuade him to leave Sorrento and, having agreed to the “post” offered by Stalin as the chief writer of the USSR, return to Russia.
"… not a dime of success, but … a pocket full of troubles"
Having put this phrase into the mouth of one of the characters in a series of stories about Mishka Yaponchik, Isaac Babel was ironic about himself too. The writer's success and troubles appeared at the same time - after Mayakovsky in 1924 published several of his short stories in his LEF magazine, which were later included in the collection "Cavalry": "Salt", "King", "Letter", - "condensed as an algebraic formula, but at the same time filled with poetry."
The book "Cavalry", with its frank terrible narration about the events of the Civil War, will later become a serious argument for the isolation and arrest of the writer.
One of the first readers of the Cavalry was Semyon Mikhailovich Budyonny, in whose First Cavalry Isaac Babel served. The creator of the red cavalry and the future marshal of the USSR threatened to personally hack the chronicler Babel with a saber for slander and denigration of the Red Army. Then Isaac Emmanuilovich was rescued by Gorky, saying in his defense: "He showed the fighters of the First Horse Cavalry better, more truthfully than Gogol - the Cossacks." There was no reception against Gorky and Gogol, and they forgot about the case for a while.
“He was a genius storyteller. His oral stories were stronger and more perfect than those written … This is a man unheard of persistent, tenacious, willing to see everything, not disdaining any knowledge … - Konstantin Paustovsky recalled.
There were persistent rumors, which Babel himself did not refute, that during the Civil War he went down to torture cellars and watched the torture of prisoners. Fazil Iskander, a Soviet writer, justifying the participation of the Chekist writer in the raids of food detachments, his presence at massacres and executions, said: “He was extremely curious about the extreme states of a person: love, passion, hatred, how a person looks and feels between life and death."
The strange behavior of the writer is perplexing. It's about the pleasure of seeing cruelty and sadism, when he revels in watching the execution of victims. However, the systemic understanding of the human psyche, which is being developed at the training of Yuri Burlan "System-vector psychology", makes it possible to explain these facts of Babel's biography, author's texts, the memories of those who knew him.
The writer is anal-visual with sound and orality. Formed in childhood, the bias from "clean" towards "dirty" in the anal vector, as well as visual swings in fear provoke Babel to passively participate in torture. “… His works are full of wild energy,” wrote Romain Rolland. Contemplation of sadism promotes the production of endorphins - hormones of pleasure that help to achieve a balanced state of the brain. Additional delight arises when the stories of the "Cavalry" cycle are described in the cruel fixations he received from what he saw: "The orange sun rolls across the sky, like a severed head … The smell of yesterday's blood and killed horses drips into the evening chill …", "A soldier smelling of raw blood and human dust ".
After the release of the Cavalry, Leon Trotsky named Babel the best Russian writer. Emigre contacts, positive assessments of Trotsky, as well as his "slanderous" "Cavalry", will still be remembered by Babel. They will serve as a guilty verdict for the writer in 1939. No one will be able to help him or will not want to. Books will be removed from libraries for as long as 20 years.
Isaac Babel, whose life ended in one of the GULAG camps, entered Soviet literature with screenplays, plays and brilliant "Odessa stories", set out in a special language, in a special manner, with a deep tragic note, telling about unique people whose fates were crossed out by the events of the revolution and Civil.
Read continuation
