the site publishes an article by the famous philologist and translator Konstantin Azadovsky, dedicated to the contacts of Heinrich Böll with the Soviet human rights and unofficial writing environment. The article first saw the light in the scientific collection of Moscow State University “Literature and Ideology. The Twentieth Century” (Issue 3, M., 2016). We thank K.M. Azadovsky for permission to publish the text as part of our project for the 100th anniversary of Böll.
The name of Heinrich Böll came to Soviet readers in the year of the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956). At first they were short stories. But soon the “thick” Soviet magazines, followed by publishing houses, are trying (at first timidly, then more and more decisively) to publish Böll’s stories and novels (“And I didn’t say a single word”, “Where have you been, Adam?”, “A house without a master ”, “Billiards at half past nine”). In the second half of the 1950s, Böll became one of the most famous and widely read Western - and most importantly - West German authors in the USSR. After the Second World War, mainly the works of East German writers were translated in the USSR; among them were such great masters as Anna Segers or Hans Fallada, Bertolt Brecht or Johannes R. Becher. Heinrich Böll was perceived in this series as a writer "from the other side", belonging, moreover, to the younger generation that had gone through the war. His voice sounded different than other writers. Whatever topics Böll addressed, he ultimately wrote about conscience and freedom, about mercy, compassion and tolerance. The German theme and recent German history were illuminated in his works by a different, "human" light. This is what ensured his colossal success in the Soviet country, barely recovering from the bloody Stalinist dictatorship.
Today, looking back, we can say: Bell's works, which were sold in huge numbers in the USSR, turned out - on the wave of the Khrushchev thaw - to be one of the brightest literary events of that era, full of joyful (unfortunately, unfulfilled) hopes and lasting approximately eight years - until the removal of Khrushchev in October 1964. The meeting of a multimillion-dollar Soviet reader with the works of Böll was perceived as a new discovery of Germany.
Böll first visited Moscow in the autumn of 1962 as part of a delegation of German writers who arrived at the invitation of the Writers' Union, and his acquaintance with Soviet Russia (stay in Moscow and trips to Leningrad and Tbilisi) proceeded at that time mainly in the official channel. However, the split within the literary intelligentsia into “dissidents” and “functionaries” at that time was not yet as clear-cut as in the second half of the 1960s, Böll got the opportunity to communicate with people who, in a few years, would hardly have been invited to an official meeting with a delegation from Germany. Among them were, among others, Lev Kopelev, who had already written about Böll, and his wife Raisa Orlova. This meeting will turn into a close long-term friendship and correspondence for the Kopelevs and the Böll family. In addition to the Kopelevs, during his first stay in Moscow and Leningrad, Böll met many people with whom he became close and long-term friends (translators, literary critics, Germanists). All of them were sincerely drawn to Böll: he attracted them not only as a famous writer or a German who had gone through the war, but also as a person “from there”, from behind the Iron Curtain. “You are very important to us as a writer and as a person,” Kopelev wrote to him on December 2, 1963.
This interest was mutual. The Soviet intelligentsia strove to communicate with Böll, but Böll, for his part, sincerely gravitated towards her. Dissatisfied with the spiritual situation in the contemporary Western world, Böll hoped to find in Russia, the country of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, the answer to questions that worried him deeply: what is this “new world” supposedly built on the principles of social justice? The writer wanted to compare Western reality, to which he was critical, with the new world that arose on the territory of the former Russia, and find an answer to the question: what kind of people inhabit the Soviet world, what are their moral characteristics and properties, and is it fair to associate with this world hope for the spiritual renewal of mankind? In this, it must be said, Heinrich Böll did not differ much from other Western European writers of the 20th century, who were brought up on the classical Russian literature of the 19th century and saw in Russia (patriarchal, later Soviet) a convincing counterbalance to the "rotten" and "perishing" civilization of the West (Reiner Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, Romain Rolland and others).
After 1962, Böll came to the USSR six more times (in 1965, 1966, 1970, 1972, 1975 and 1979) and each time not as a tourist or a famous writer, but as a person seeking to comprehend what is happening "under socialism." Böll peered closely into the life of the country and its people, trying to see it not through the window of a tourist bus, but through the eyes of the people with whom he communicated. Meeting friends in Russia becomes with time an integral and, it seems, an internally necessary part of his existence. The circle of acquaintances is constantly expanding - so much so that when the writer comes to Moscow, he devotes almost all his time to conversations with old and new friends (from this point of view, Böll cannot be compared with any Western European or American writer of that time). To writers and Germanic philologists who knew German, read Böll in the original, translated his works or wrote about him (K.P. Bogatyrev, E.A. Katseva, T.L. Motyleva, R.Ya. Rait-Kovaleva, P.M. Toper, S.L. Fridlyand, I.M. Fradkin, L.B. Chernaya and others), people of other professions join: artists (Boris Birger, Valentin Polyakov, Alec Rappoport), actors (primarily - Gennady Bortnikov, who brilliantly played the role of Hans Schnier in the play “Through the Eyes of a Clown” at the Mossovet Theater), etc. As for Soviet writers, among those whom Heinrich Böll met (sometimes fleetingly), we see Konstantin Paustovsky and Mikhail Dudin, Boris Slutsky and David Samoilov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrey Voznesensky, Bell Akhmadulin and Vasily Aksenov, Bulat Okudzhava and Fazil Iskander, Viktor Nekrasov and Vladimir Voinovich (Böll's communication with the latter two continued after their departure from the USSR). In 1972, Böll met Evgenia Ginzburg and Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose memoirs had already appeared in the West by that time (Bell wrote an introduction for the book The Steep Route). Böll's attention to contemporary Soviet literature, his attempts to support some Soviet writers (for example, Yuri Trifonov, whom he nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1974) or to draw the attention of the German reading public to them, are an integral and most important part of his journalism of the 1970s - 1980s -s.
And yet, Lev Kopelev invariably remained the central figure among Böll's Moscow acquaintances. It was thanks to him that Böll entered into communication with that narrow circle, which can rightfully be considered the Russian cultural elite of that time and which was undoubtedly marked by more or less pronounced "dissent" . Many of them would later become close friends and correspondents of the German writer: the artist Boris Birger, the translator Konstantin Bogatyrev, the mistress of the Moscow "dissident" salon Mishka (Wilhelmina) Slavutskaya and others - they all met Böll with the participation of the Kopelevs. However, the most prominent figure in this circle was then undoubtedly Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The relationship between Böll and Solzhenitsyn began in 1962 - at a time when the story "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" was still being prepared for publication, and Kopelev, who introduced both writers, sincerely called Solzhenitsyn his "friend". Subsequently, Böll will dedicate to Solzhenitsyn - as his books appear in Germany - several essays and reviews. Solzhenitsyn's name is constantly present in his correspondence with Kopelev, although it is usually not mentioned directly: either it is indicated by the letters A.S., or by the hint "our friend", or - after February 1974 - allegorically (for example, "your guest") .
From the archive of Maria Orlova
The spiritual evolution of Solzhenitsyn, his inner path and, accordingly, his divergence from Kopelev is the most important topic of Russian social thought of the 20th century, and historians (and not only historians of literature) will turn to various aspects of this “friendship-enmity” more than once. It is curious that in the growing controversy (already in the 1980s), Böll did not unconditionally take Kopelev's position: in Solzhenitsyn's Russian nationalism, he (Böll) saw a certain “rightness”.
The expulsion of Solzhenitsyn from the USSR on February 13, 1974, his landing at the Frankfurt airport, where Böll met him, and his first days in the West, spent in Böll's house near Cologne (Langenbroich / Eifel), - the largest events of that time, which have now become textbooks, represent a "climax" in the relationship between Russian and German writers and at the same time symbolize the rapprochement of Russian and German culture through the head of any "government" and any "ideology".
Anna Akhmatova rises next to Solzhenitsyn. The circumstances in which she found herself after 1946 were apparently well known to the German writer who visited her on August 17, 1965 in Komarovo. Böll, his wife and sons were accompanied on this trip by Lev and Raisa Kopelev and the Leningrad philologist-Germanist Vladimir Admoni, an old and close acquaintance of Akhmatova - Böll met him in 1962 during the reception of the German delegation at the Leningrad House of Writers. Professor Admoni stood out among the scientists of his generation for his erudition, elegance and "Europeanism". It is not surprising that, having barely met Admoni, Böll felt interest and sympathy for him.
Böll's Komarov meeting with Akhmatova turned out to be the only one that the German writer remembered for a long time. “I often remember our joint trip to Anna Akhmatova, a wonderful woman,” Belle wrote to Vladimir Admoni (letter dated September 15, 1965).
Subsequently, Böll and Admoni regularly exchanged letters, which constitute - taken together - an important addition to the correspondence between Böll and Kopelev. In some of them, Böll frankly tells Admoni about the events of his life, shares his views on the life of modern Germany, and some of his judgments are very remarkable.
«<…>And now we have something happening here that is not only not fun, but downright dangerous: in particular, Berlin and everything connected with it is sheer demagogy. The Germans do not want to understand that they lost the war of conquest and committed the murder of other peoples, they completely lack understanding and feeling (there was never one or the other) of the inexorability of history. Not too happy is what appears and has already appeared here this year under the guise of “young” literature: b about Most of it is full of sex - one that, in my opinion, is pathetic and provincial and, much worse, full of violence and cruelty. Sometimes I'm scared: it seems that elements of sadism have passed from the concentration camps into our literature ... "
This and many other things, about which Böll wrote to him, found a lively response and understanding from Admoni. Admoni gave his article on Böll's novel Through the Eyes of a Clown the title "From the Standpoint of the Human Soul" (the editors removed the word "soul" and the article appeared under the title "From the Standpoint of Humanity").
Along with Admoni, Böll was familiar and friendly with another Leningrad philologist - translator and literary critic Efim Etkind. His personal acquaintance with Böll dates back to 1965. At that time, Etkind was closely associated with Solzhenitsyn and helped him in the creation of the Gulag Archipelago. In 1974, Etkind was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers and forced - under pressure from the authorities - to emigrate (like Solzhenitsyn or Lev Kopelev, Etkind did not want to leave and publicly urged Soviet Jews not to do so). Subsequently, Etkind described the events of that time, as well as his principled position regarding "departure", in his memoir "Notes of a Non-Conspirator", known in Germany under the title "Unblutige Hinrichtung. Warum ich die Sowjetunion verlassen musste” (“Bloody execution. Why I had to leave the Soviet Union”, 1978).
Photo by Ekaterina Zvorykina
It was Etkind who introduced Böll to the young Leningrad poet Joseph Brodsky (in 1964, Etkind, along with Admoni, acted as Brodsky's public defender in court). A striking circumstance: Böll, who did not speak Russian, immediately appreciated Brodsky, felt his significance, his creative possibilities. He invited Brodsky to take part in the television film "Dostoevsky's Petersburg", the script of which he wrote himself (together with Erich Kok). Brodsky's participation in this film, still unknown in Russia, is a remarkable fact. This is, in essence, the first appearance of Brodsky in front of a movie camera (in any case, "Western"), and everything that he enthusiastically says in that film is an important and genuine evidence of his then moods and views.
A photograph taken by Etkind's wife, Ekaterina Zvorykina, has been preserved: Böll, Etkind and Brodsky, three of them, in the Etkinds' apartment. The photo was taken in February 1972. In a few months, Brodsky will leave the country.
Squeezing people out of the country became a common way in the 1970s to crack down on dissidents. Joseph Brodsky opens this series (1972); he is followed by Solzhenitsyn (1974), followed by Etkind (1974), then Lev Kopelev (1980). All of them end up in the West, and all of them are friends or acquaintances of Heinrich Böll, who maintain relations with him, use his help, etc.
Thus, Heinrich Böll - primarily thanks to Lev Kopelev - found himself at the very center of Soviet dissent in the 1960s and 1970s, and, one might say, an active participant in the Russian liberation movement of the "stagnant" era. Böll was well informed about everything that happened in those years in Moscow: Kopelev's letters to him mention Andrei Amalrik, Yuri Galanskov, Alexander Ginzburg, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, General Petr Grigorenko, Yuli Daniel, Anatoly Marchenko, Andrei Sinyavsky, Petr Yakir, Ukrainian prisoners of conscience (Ivan Dzyuba, Valentin Moroz, Yevgeny Sverchuk, Ivan Svitlichny, Vasyl Stus…) and others. Information about their situation penetrated the West and the Western press, not least thanks to Kopelev's letters, which contained not only information about arrests, searches, trials against individuals, but also a number of Böll's valuable judgments, advice, and recommendations. So, in the summer of 1973, when the question arose of admitting Soviet authors to the International PEN Club (one of the forms of support at that time), Kopelev informed Böll, who was elected president of this organization in 1972, his opinion on how to act.
“I very, very much ask you and all the leaders of PEN who want to help us with our deeds,” writes, for example, Kopelev Böll (letter dated July 6-10, 1973), “to expedite the admission to the national branches of PEN, first of all, of those writers who are in danger (Maximov, Galich, Lukash, Kochur, Nekrasov, Korzhavin). For the sake of objectivity, neutral authors, Voznesensky, Simonov, Shaginyan, Georgy Markov, should also be included; don't forget those who are currently under seemingly less threat (Aleks. Solzhenitsyn, Lidia Chukovskaya, Okudzhava, myself too); but now, after the Convention, our situation may become more complicated again. However, above all: do not weaken all kinds of public and (confidentially) lobbying efforts in defense of the convicts - Grigorenko, Amalrik, Bukovsky, Dziuba, Svitlichny and others. Please explain to all of you: today there is a real opportunity - like never before!!! - to effectively influence the local authorities from abroad through friendly, but constant pressure. It is necessary that as many “authoritative” people as possible take part in this: politicians, industrialists, artists, journalists, writers, scientists ... and let their efforts not be limited to one-time demonstrations - one should again and again insistently talk about it, write, ask, demand, act with collegiate guarantees. Generosity, tolerance, humanity, and the like are the best prerequisites for confidential business communication, they testify to strength, reliability, honesty, etc. ” .
Heinrich Böll, no doubt, took to heart the requests of his Moscow friend and responded to them. He repeatedly signed letters and petitions addressed to the leaders of the USSR, asking for the release of political prisoners or mitigation of their fate. It is also appropriate to recall Böll's attentive attitude to everything that was happening then in the Russian emigration, especially in Paris, to disputes and ideological battles in this motley environment. It seemed to Böll that Soviet dissidents were biased in their assessments: they declared that the West was not sufficiently opposed to the threat posed by the Soviet Union, they took Western pluralism for softness or "carelessness", they were too implacable towards the "socialists" and "leftists" (whom Böll sympathized with ). The German writer argued with Vladimir Bukovsky and Naum Korzhavin, criticized the position of Vladimir Maksimov and his magazine "Continent", which was financially supported by the "right" Axel Springer.
Summarizing, we can say that in the history of freethinking and spiritual resistance, as it developed in our country in the 1960s - 1980s, the name of Heinrich Böll occupies a special, exceptional place.
A review of Böll's "dissident" connections would be incomplete without the name of Konstantin Bogatyrev, a translator of German poetry and a prisoner of the Gulag in the past. They met in Moscow in the autumn of 1966, corresponded and met every time Böll came to Moscow. It was Bogatyrev who introduced Böll to A.D. Sakharov, whose fate worried the German writer, who repeatedly spoke out in defense of the persecuted academician. The meeting that took place (a discussion arose between them on a number of issues) led to a "joint appeal in defense of Vladimir Bukovsky, all political prisoners and prisoners of psychiatric hospitals, especially patients and women." In his memoirs A.D. Sakharov calls Böll "a wonderful person".
Konstantin Bogatyrev died in June 1976 after a blow to the head inflicted on him in the entrance of a Moscow house at the door of his apartment. Neither the perpetrators of the crime, nor its customers are known to this day, although the opinion has been firmly established in the public mind that it was a kind of "action of intimidation" by the KGB. So did Böll. The violent death of Bogatyrev deeply struck Heinrich Böll, who responded to this event with a sympathetic and heartfelt article. “He belonged,” Böll writes about Bogatyrev, “to the number of our best Moscow friends. He was a born dissident, one of the first people I met; he was such by nature, instinctively - long before dissidence took shape as a movement and gained fame ... ".
In these words, Böll touches on one of the aspects of Russian-Soviet social life, the topic of stormy and not completely resonated discussions: a dissident or not a dissident? Who can be included in this group? Delving deeper into this issue, the modern French researcher decisively separates "dissenters", "kitchen" rebels, and "dissidents" - people who "dare to take to the square." “In the seventies and eighties,” she says in her book, “millions of people in the USSR think “differently” than the authorities, feed - some to a greater, others to a lesser extent - doubt, distrust and even hostility towards what preaches and what the state requires. But only a few dozen of them become dissidents: they dare to publicly demand the rights and freedoms that, as it is written in the laws and the Constitution of the country and as it is stated in words, are guaranteed to Soviet citizens. Whatever conversations were conducted in the post-Stalin era “in the kitchen”, few people openly defended their views “in the square” - it was from then on that the opposition of “kitchen” and “square” was fixed in the Russian language. This semantic difference persists to the present day. In his recent interview with Novaya Gazeta, which appeared on the eve of his 80th birthday, Yakov Gordin decisively contrasts both concepts: "I was not a dissident, I was an anti-Soviet."
So can Konstantin Bogatyrev, Joseph Brodsky, Yefim Etkind, Lev Kopelev be considered "dissidents"? Or, say, Vladimir Voinovich, Vladimir Kornilov, Boris Birger, Böll's friends and acquaintances? After all, they were all staunch opponents of the Soviet regime, they criticized it openly and sometimes publicly, signing, for example, all sorts of “protest letters”, they did not follow the “rules of the game” that the System imposed (reading prohibited literature, meetings with foreigners not sanctioned from above, etc.). . P.). At the same time, this definition seems inaccurate, since none of the named persons was a member of any party or group, did not join any social movement, and was not engaged in "underground" activities. Criticism of the Soviet regime was not their end in itself or their main occupation; they wrote prose or poetry, translated, created. It is unlikely that any of them would agree with the definition of "dissident". Lev Kopelev, for example, protested when he was called a "dissident"; in his letters to Böll, he sometimes puts this word in quotation marks. Not surprisingly, such sentiments distinguished at that time a significant part of the critically thinking Soviet intelligentsia.
The word "dissidence" became a synonym for free-thinking in the USSR. People who openly declare their disagreement with the actions of the authorities have long been perceived in Russia as "Masons", "rebels", "renegades", representatives of the "fifth column"; they became "dissidents" against their own will.
Of course, the official Soviet authorities did not give much thought to these definitions; all the writers or artists named above, acquaintances and friends of Heinrich Böll, the authorities indiscriminately called either "dissidents" or "malicious anti-Sovietists." It is not surprising that Heinrich Böll - during each of his stays in the USSR - was closely monitored. The mechanism of the so-called "external observation" was used; studied written reports and reports coming from the Foreign Commission of the Writers' Union "upstairs" - to the Central Committee.
In the mid-1990s, the documents found in the Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documents were published in the Russian press. This is an important biographical material, a kind of "chronicle" of Heinrich Böll's meetings and conversations, the history of his contacts with the Soviet intelligentsia. From these reports, one can, for example, learn that in the summer of 1965 Böll, who arrived in the USSR with his wife and two sons, “was received at their apartment by L.Z. Kopelev and his wife R.D. Orlova, Lyudmila Chernaya and her husband Daniil Melnikov, Ilya Fradkin, E.G. Etkind, as well as Mikhail Dudin, whom Böll met on his previous visit to the Soviet Union. And in connection with Böll’s stay in the USSR in February-March 1972, it was emphasized (in the corresponding report) that “successful work with Heinrich Böll is largely hindered by the irresponsible behavior of the member of the SP L. Kopelev, who imposed his own program on him and organized without the knowledge Union of Writers numerous meetings of Böll ”(names are given, in particular, the names of Evgenia Ginzburg, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Boris Birger).
However, educational work with Böll did not bring the desired results: the writer definitely gravitated towards "rabid anti-Soviet". This is finally revealed in 1974, when Böll meets Solzhenitsyn at the Frankfurt airport and receives him at his house near Cologne. True, a year later Böll flew to Moscow again, but the style of the reports sent to the Central Committee no longer leaves any doubt that now the authorities see him as an enemy, almost a spy.
«<…>He is looking for meetings mainly with people like L. Kopelev, A. Sakharov and the like, who take positions hostile to our country, ”V.M. Ozerov, Secretary of the Board of the USSR Writers' Union. He also drew attention to the fact that, upon his return to Germany, Böll published a letter signed by him together with Sakharov to the leaders of the Soviet Union with a request to release all political prisoners. The Secretary of the Board puts the words “political prisoners” in quotation marks and gives the following recommendation: “It is expedient for all Soviet organizations to show coldness in relations with Böll at the present time, to speak critically about his unfriendly behavior, to indicate that the only correct way for him is to refuse cooperation with anti-Soviet, which casts a shadow on the name of the humanist writer.
However, the "humanist writer" did not heed the recommendations of literary officials and, to his credit, never flirted with official Moscow.
In the end, Böll was, as you know, completely removed from the Soviet reader for more than ten years: he was stopped translating, publishing, staged and, finally, stopped being allowed into the Soviet Union. To keep in touch with him in those years meant to challenge the System. Few have dared to do so.
Mention should be made of the scandal that erupted in 1973 around the publication in Novy Mir (Nos. 2-6) of Böll's novel Group Portrait with a Lady. In the text of the novel, abbreviations were made regarding erotica, strong folk expressions, passages dedicated to Soviet prisoners of war, scenes depicting the actions of the Red Army in East Prussia, etc. were removed. Böll's friends (Kopelevs, Bogatyrev) considered the translator of the novel responsible for distorting the text L. Chernaya (although, of course, she did not act of her own free will). “... You can understand the translator,” Evgenia Katseva recalled, adding that Soviet censorship was there (that is, in Böll’s novel. - K. A.) had something to cling to.
Konstantin Bogatyrev, who checked the original against the translation, told Böll about multiple intrusions into his text, “and the tolerant Böll, who usually showed tolerance, lost his temper so much that he forbade publishing his translation as a separate book ...” After that, a noise began in the West German press, followed by another the scandal associated with the expulsion of Solzhenitsyn. Public opinion (Germanists, publishers, literary and near-literary circles) strongly condemned the translator, who allowed the text to be distorted. “... I felt undeservedly spat on, slandered, unhappy,” recalls L. Chernaya. And not a single person stood up for me. Everyone pretended that there was no censorship, but only unscrupulous translators. And they pecked at me non-stop."
Heinrich Böll died in July 1985. A few days before his death, the Literaturnaya Gazeta published (abridged) Letter to My Sons, and the writer managed to find out about this publication and, of course, rejoiced at the turning point. But Heinrich Böll could not even suspect that this event was not an accident and that 1985 would turn out to be a “turning point” for all of recent history.
The history of Böll's relationship with his friends and acquaintances in Moscow, Leningrad and Tbilisi should long ago have been devoted to a volume under the general title "Heinrich Böll and Russia". Numerous documents (letters, telegrams, photographs, newspaper clippings), collected under one cover, will provide an opportunity to see Heinrich Böll in all the variety of his personal connections with a narrow but wonderful circle of the Moscow-Petersburg cultural elite. The German writer appears in this retrospection as an active participant in our literary and socio-political life of that time. A dissident in spirit, as he was in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s, Heinrich Böll, a writer with a "living, sensitive conscience", felt his inner kinship with this circle and perceived himself - of course, to a certain extent - Soviet a dissident and, therefore, a Russian intellectual.
Black L. Oblique rain. S. 479. The presentation of events in this memoir book seems to be clearly biased in places.
Belle G. Letter to my sons or Four bicycles // Literary newspaper. 1985. No. 27, July 3. P. 15 (translated by E. Katseva).
Kopelev L. In the name of conscience // Culture and life. 1962. No. 6. S. 28.
The story of how Heinrich Böll came to us in 1979
Alexander Birger
This text formed the basis of the German documentary "Heinrich Böll: Under the Red Star", where Alexei Birger acted as a "through" presenter. The film premiered on German television on November 29, 1999, and in Moscow the film could be seen at the Cinema House on December 13, 1999 - it was presented from Germany at the Stalker Film Festival.
HEINRICH BELL last visited the Soviet Union in 1979, arrived for ten days.
It so happened that I witnessed many events connected with this visit. I turned out to be a witness who had the opportunity to see a lot and remember a lot because my father, the artist Boris Georgievich Birger, was one of Heinrich Böll's closest Russian friends.
DON'T WAIT
In order to understand why Bell was not very kindly received in the USSR, one must know some circumstances.
Officially, Bell remained a "progressive" German writer, Nobel Prize winner, one of the most significant people in the international PEN club (where he was president for a long time) - because of this, because of his worldwide fame and the significance of any of his words for everything Peace be upon him, apparently, and they were afraid to refuse an entry visa. But by that time, Bell had already managed to “guilty” himself in many respects before the Soviet ideology.
The writer spoke sharply in a number of articles and statements against the introduction of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakia. To judge what happened during the suppression of the "Prague Spring", he could better than anyone, because he managed to be in Prague just at the time of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops. Perhaps the humanity of Bell's position turned out to be an additional insult to our authorities: in one of the essays about what he saw, Bell wrote how sorry he was for the Russian soldiers drawn into this dirty story for no reason at all, cited many facts, what a shock it turned out to be for the rank and file of the army discover at dawn that they are not on "maneuvers", as they were announced, but in the role of invaders in a foreign country. Bell also told about cases of suicide among Soviet soldiers known to him.
Among the many things that sharpened their teeth on Bell, one can recall the following fact: when Bell was president of the international PEN club, the authorities of the Writers' Union courted and flattered him in every possible way so that he agreed to accept the Writers' Union as a "collective member" of the PEN Club. ", that is, that everyone admitted to the Writers' Union would simultaneously receive membership in the PEN Club, and everyone expelled from the Writers' Union would lose this membership. Belle, not even indignantly, but with great surprise, rejected this nonsense, after which many writers (and, it seems, not only writers) "aces" harbored a fierce anger at him.
Belle hurt the interests of the writer's mafia, not only by refusing to enlist her en masse in the Pen Club. Bell had a rather sharp explanation with the Writers' Union and the VAAP with the participation of Konstantin Bogatyrev, his close friend, a wonderful translator from German and a human rights activist. Bogatyrev was killed under very mysterious circumstances, and Belle was going to visit his grave. The death of Bogatyrev was associated with his human rights activities. But there was another moment. Shortly before his death, Bogatyrev conducted a thorough analysis of Bell's Russian translations (as far as I remember, at the request of Bell himself - but this should be clarified with the people who were directly involved in this story) and only gross distortions and alterations of the author's meaning scored forty pages of short text! So, as a result of these distortions, "Through the Eyes of a Clown" turned from an anti-clerical novel into an anti-religious, atheistic one, and a number of other works turned out to be turned inside out.
Bell was furious and demanded that his works in this form should no longer be published in the Soviet Union. Naturally, this requirement of the author was not fulfilled, but this explanation with the indignant Bell spoiled a lot of blood for our bureaucrats. Not to mention the fact that the scandal turned out to be international and greatly damaged the reputation of "the Soviet school of translation - the best and most professional school in the world" (which, by the way, was close to the truth when it came to translating classics and "ideologically harmless" things). Many authors began to look cautiously to see if they were being disfigured too much in Soviet translations.
It should be borne in mind that the Soviet state tried to allow translators in whom it was "confident" to work not only with "ideologically slippery", but also with living Western authors in general. That is, translators went through the same screening process as all other citizens who, by the nature of their activities, had to communicate with people of the Western world. Exceptions were rare.
With a simple requirement to respect the author's text, Belle and Bogatyrev encroached on the foundations of the system, which meant a lot, including complete control over communication with Western people and over the form in which Western ideas should reach Soviet people.
When writers and translators begin to live according to the laws of the secret services (and most importantly, according to the laws of the "nomenklatura"), then they choose the ways of solving problems that are characteristic of the special services. And the fact that Bell announced publicly: one of the main goals of his arrival in the Soviet Union - to visit the grave of Konstantin Bogatyrev and bow to the ashes of one of his closest friends, could not but cause bitterness.
The above is quite enough to give an idea of the general background against which Heinrich Belle, his wife Annamari, their son Raymond and the wife of their son Gaide got off the plane to the international department of Sheremetyevo airport on Monday, July 23, 1979.
We, who were meeting, could see the customs desk, where the baggage of the Bellei family was checked. It was a real "shmon" with somewhat paradoxical results. Bell was seized from the last issue of the Spiegel magazine, which he read on the road, with a photograph of Brezhnev on the cover, concluding that if there is a photograph of Brezhnev, then something anti-Soviet must have been printed in the magazine, but they did not notice and missed the one that had just appeared on German language book by Lev Kopelev - one of the then forbidden authors.
The Bellis stayed in the new building at the National Hotel, and, after a short rest, went to dinner, which was arranged in their honor by Moscow friends. Dinner was hosted by a very nice middle-aged woman whom everyone called Mishka. As far as I understood from the conversations, she was an ethnic German, went through camps, and by that time had become an active participant in the Russian-German cultural bridge, the main architects of which were Bell and Kopelev, both of her great friends.
There was also a conversation that Heinrich Böll, then already a severe diabetic (and not only a diabetic - diabetes was only one, albeit the main, “flower” in a large bouquet of diseases, the medicines for which were sometimes mutually exclusive), need to follow a strict diet , as well as the obligatory timing between food intake and medication, as is the case with diabetics who are on insulin injections. The Bellei family not only doubted, but asked if Heinrich would be able to provide such food at the hotel or should he take care of insurance options?
The very next day, some plans had to be adjusted, because it became obvious that the authorities were trying in every possible way to demonstrate to Bell their dissatisfaction with his arrival and his plans, and the social circle scheduled for this visit, and resorted to quite strong psychological pressure, sometimes more like psychological terror. From the very morning, the Belley family was "led" openly, frankly trying to make Belli notice the surveillance. Black "Volgas" with antennas sticking out and pointing in their direction (so that there was no doubt that all conversations were being eavesdropped and recorded) constantly spun around. We went to Izmailovo, to my father's workshop, where Belle looked very carefully at the paintings that he had not yet seen. Belle struck with thoughtfulness and concentration when he peered into the next canvas, not even somehow immersing himself in the world of painting, but dissolving in this world, deep penetration into the images of the artist. At such moments, his resemblance to the wise old leader of the elephant herd became even more obvious.
From the workshop we went to have lunch at my father's apartment on Mayakovskaya, deciding after dinner to take a little walk along the Garden Ring, and from there move beyond the Taganka, see the Krutitsky Teremok and the Andronikov Monastery. Cars accompanied us all the time, they were on duty under the windows when we had lunch, and when we walked along the Garden Ring to turn towards Presnya at Vosstaniya Square (now Kudrinskaya), a black Volga with extended and antennas pointing in our direction. This mockingly impudent surveillance became so unbearable that suddenly Vladimir Voinovich, who had been with us since the very morning, in general a very reserved person, abruptly cut off his conversation with Bell, jumped up to the Volga, jerked open its door and began to cover those who were sitting in it on what the light is standing, shouting that this is a shame for the whole country and shame on them. Everyone was a little taken aback, and then my father and I managed to drag Voinovich away from the car. I must say, the people in the car all this time were sitting without moving and not looking in our direction.
The provocations were on the rise, and a typical example is how the troubles with the dietary and regimen nutrition necessary for Bell were exacerbated. On the very first morning, Bellei was “marinated” at the entrance to the National restaurant for almost an hour, as they say. They had full opportunity to see the empty hall and hear that the tables were not yet ready and therefore they could not be served. It should be noted that before going down to breakfast, Belle took his medication and took an insulin shot. So things could have ended badly on the very first day of Bell's stay in Moscow.
At some point, a man approached Bell and addressed him in German, saying that he was also a guest of the hotel, and asked if he was not mistaken in recognizing the famous writer. Belle replied that his interlocutor was not mistaken, and explained his situation. “Oh, so you don’t know the local rules yet!” replied the German, who recognized Belle. “You just need to know that as soon as the head waiter receives ten rubles, a table will appear at that very second.”
Just then Kopelev arrived, understanding the situation at first glance and taking Bellei with him.
Such decomposition in the Intourist system was observed at every turn. Workers in this area extorted money and bribes in a different form, wherever possible, spitting on the fear of any "authorities", before the possibility of running into a disguised KGB officer - for extortion from foreigners, they could heat up someone who got caught so that he would hiccup for a long time.
So, the Bellei family was going to visit Vladimir and Suzdal, and for this it was necessary to obtain special permission. Belle approached the lady in charge of issuing these permits, accompanied by Kopelev. The lady grunted gloomily that permits are issued in two weeks, that they still need to decide who to give them and who not, and that in general it is her birthday today, she is in a hurry and cannot do all this. Kopelev asked her to wait five minutes, quickly dragged Bell to the foreign exchange shop at the hotel and pointed at pantyhose, a bottle of perfume and something else. Belle hinted at the fact that it would be a brazen bribe to the point of indecentness and it was generally inconvenient to give a woman such rubbish from a stranger. Kopelev objected that everything was convenient and for her it was not rubbish. Five minutes later they returned to this lady, and Kopelev said with a charming smile: “Sorry, we didn’t know that it was your birthday. But let me congratulate you.” Five minutes later, they had a special permit for the trip of the entire Bellei family to Vladimir and Suzdal.
The work of the German writer Heinrich Böll is almost entirely devoted to the theme of the war and post-war life in Germany. His works immediately gained fame, began to be published in many countries of the world, and in 1972 the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize "for his work, which combines a wide coverage of reality with the high art of creating characters and which has become a significant contribution to the revival of German literature."
The first collection of the author, consisting of novels and stories, "Wanderer, when you come to Spa ..." is dedicated to the tragic fate of young German guys who had to go to the front right from school. This theme continues to develop in the later cycles of prose "When the war began" and "When the war ended." Moving on to larger epic forms, Heinrich creates his first novels about the war: "The train came on time" and "Where have you been, Adam?".
From 1939 to 1945, Heinrich Bell was a soldier in the Nazi army. His testimonies as a front-line writer have a high degree of reliability. When the question arose about the publication of his novel Where Have You Been, Adam? in Russia, the writer approved the publication of his work under one cover with the story of Viktor Nekrasov "In the trenches of Stalingrad", in which the war is shown through the eyes of a young Russian lieutenant.
The action of the novel "Where have you been, Adam?" takes place in 1945, when it was already clear to the Germans that the war was lost. German troops are retreating, the wounded are being evacuated. Belle shows the broken, exhausted people whom the "damned war" has made indifferent to the point of apathy. The war brought them only grief, longing and hatred for those who sent them to fight. The heroes of the work already understand the senselessness of the war, they internally saw the light and do not want to die for Hitler. These deceived and unfortunate victims are contrasted in the novel with the "masters of death", for whom war is a profit and satisfaction of a manic thirst for power over the whole world.
The narrative flows slowly, even sluggishly - this creates a sense of hopelessness. The final episode of the novel shocks the reader with its tragedy. The hero of the novel Fainhals, finally finding himself in his native city, smiling with happiness, goes to his parents' house, on which a huge white flag is hung. The soldier recognizes in him a festive tablecloth that his mother once laid on the table. At this time, gunfire begins. Making his way to the house, Feinhals repeats: "Madness, what madness!" Before his eyes, “the sixth shell hit the pediment of the house - bricks flew down, plaster fell on the sidewalk, and he heard his mother scream in the basement. He quickly crawled to the porch, heard the approaching whistle of the seventh shell and screamed in mortal anguish. He screamed for several seconds, suddenly feeling that dying was not so easy at all, shouting loudly until the shell overtook him and, dead, threw him on the threshold of his home.
Heinrich Belle, one of the first German writers, raised the problem of the guilt of both the rulers and the people of Germany for the unleashed world war. The writer argued that war cannot be an excuse for anyone.
In subsequent work, Bell spoke about the attitude towards fascism, described the post-war devastation in Germany and the times when new fascists began to raise their heads, trying to revive the cult of Hitler. One of the issues of concern to the writer is the question of the future of the country.
Although the action of Bell's novels "And He Didn't Say a Single Word", "House Without a Master", "Billiards at half past nine", "Group Portrait with a Lady" takes place in post-war Germany, the war is invisibly present in them, its curse weighs on the heroes. The war cannot be forgotten by the Germans, whose fathers, brothers, husbands died somewhere in distant Russia. The former boys, whose youth was spent under bullets in the trenches, cannot forget her, such as the wonderful writer, courageous and honest German Heinrich Belle.
For the first time I saw Heinrich Böll in the autumn of 1962 in Moscow, in the Small Hall of the Central House of Writers. More people crowded into the Small Hall than it could accommodate; many sat on chairs brought from the foyer.
For Soviet readers of that time, he was the most important contemporary German writer. Everything or almost everything that he wrote was translated. His books were published in large numbers. And, as a rule, they were published in the journal Foreign Literature, sometimes in Novy Mir. Both magazines—first of all, of course, Novy Mir—played an important role in the life of the Soviet intelligentsia. Through an extensive network of local libraries, as well as through subscriptions, they reached the very hinterland. If you were to ask a reading citizen of our vast country what modern German writer he knows, Heinrich Böll would be the first to be named.
Disgust for war
Later, when Böll supported Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other writers persecuted in those years, the attitude towards him on the part of those who officially led literature in the Soviet Union changed dramatically. But in 1962, everyone smiled, including Boris Suchkov, who led the ceremony in the Small Hall of the Central House of Writers and sat at the head of the table (the future director of the academic Institute of World Literature), who, on duty, entered into an ideological polemic with Böll.
Actually, there was nothing to argue about. Böll felt a sense of guilt and shame for the fact that - against his will - he participated in the war, including on the Eastern Front, that is, he fought directly against the Soviet Union. He never hid this, and in his works and in personal conversations he spoke frankly about it. Sincerely - and he was generally a very sincere person - he regretted that this was the case. He never tried to justify himself (and did not like it when his compatriots did), relieve himself of the heavy burden of guilt and always shared responsibility for the deeds of the Nazi Reich, although he hated both Hitler and his Reich with all his heart.
But Boris Leontyevich Suchkov, a highly intelligent and decent person, with a tragic fate - according to a false denunciation, he spent a certain number of years in Soviet camps - according to the routine, he considered it necessary to start a senseless dispute with Böll, from which Böll did not evade even in his characteristic In a soft, benevolent manner, he replied to Suchkov, who assumed a warlike air.
When the official part was over, I managed to squeeze through to Böll, ask him a few questions and receive from him as a gift, with an inscription in red ink, a thin book just published in the FRG - two stories: “When the war began” and “When the war ended” . At home, I immediately read them, and they won me over with their sincere intonation, honesty, and the author's ardent distaste for war conveyed in them. I still have this book. The red ink has faded and is almost gone...
Then we met several times in different years with Böll in Germany, and each time we talked about his works. I tried to ask him what he was working on, what topics and problems he was most interested in at one time or another.
“The war,” Heinrich Böll recalled, “I went through as an infantryman on various fields of military operations between Cap Grin and the road to Kerch, was wounded four times. Nevertheless, the war appeared to me as a monstrous machinery of boredom, which the Nazis made even more boring than it is by nature: a bloody, endless boredom that was interrupted by nothing but letters from my wife and parents and wounds, which I welcomed because they somehow meant vacation.
Another impression of the war: hack work. There are probably writers who are hacks, there are probably a lot of hacks among carpenters and politicians, but I think that in no profession there are so many hacks - and in no profession does hack have such bloody consequences as in the professional military community.
The horrifying end of the war came: orders whose inhumanity could no longer be compared with anything; the disintegration of the Wehrmacht, which represented complete decay from within: hordes, unseen since the 30-year war, spread across the country, blowing up bridges; hops of destruction: deserters were hanged, shot two minutes before the end of the war, and somewhere in his bunker in Berlin sat Hitler, the rat of decay, biting his nails, while the generals and field marshals carried out the will of the rat.
Discarded orders
The hero of his famous novel "Billiards at half past nine" throws away his orders - he does not want his grandson to discover them: "Two orders? Well, of course, I built trenches, laid mine galleries, fortified artillery positions, steadfastly held out under hurricane fire, pulled out the wounded from the battlefield; yes, a cross of the second degree and the first degree ... We will throw them into the drainpipe, let them be covered with mud in the gutter.
Why is he throwing away medals? One day his son pulled them out of the closet. Too late, the father noticed the fatal gleam in the boy's eyes. It is necessary to throw them away at least now, even if the grandson does not find them in his grandfather's inheritance: "Let the honors that were paid to our fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers perish." Thus Böll's hero breaks with the whole militaristic tradition of Germany.
The war in Böll's stories is “horror without end and without edge! Day and night - military uniform and the nonsense of duty, the arrogantly shrill irritability of officers and the rude shouts of non-commissioned officers! Everyone was driven to war, like in a herd, a hopeless gray huge herd of desperate people! The daily routine of the war is dirty, lice-infested barracks, cold on the city streets of foreign countries, soldiers shaking in trucks, shivering from the cold and dreaming of hot soup and cigarettes (the story "Then in Odessa").
Nazi propaganda in the name of raising morale tried to inspire youth with tremulous delight. In the press, in weekly newsreels, in all genres and forms of "patriotic" art and literature, the war was portrayed as an "adventure" that every self-respecting young German must go through.
Böll did everything possible to de-heroize war: “War, where it is really war, is an endless game, endless boasting. Stupidity, bloody stupidity, senseless, absolutely senseless actions that everyone knew were meaningless. Nowhere will the reader find a "kind word" about the war, its instigators and zealous executors of orders. His heroes are the very “downcast”, “dejected” people who were driven to the slaughter.
One of Böll's most famous stories is "Traveler, when you come to Spa ...". The wounded young man ends up - on a stretcher - in his native city. They carry him along the floors and corridors, and he understands: he is in the drawing room of a classical gymnasium, turned into a field infirmary. There are three of them in the city: one is the Frederick the Great Gymnasium, another is the Albert Gymnasium, and the third is the Adolf Hitler Gymnasium.
The young man was brought exactly to the one where he studied for eight years - the gymnasium of Frederick the Great. He got to the front quite recently, straight from school. He thinks: a new monument to soldiers will be erected here. How many names will be carved there? “I went to the front from school and fell for… But I still don’t know for what,” the young man reflects, imagining his name carved on the monument.
On the blackboard are the words he still wrote! The handwriting is exactly his - just three months ago he wrote on it: "Traveler, when you come to Spa ..." (a hint at the well-known story about three hundred Spartans). He did not have time to finish the word "Sparta". Behind this blackboard he was undressed, and he saw that he no longer had arms and right leg.
A poignant story, laconic and immensely sad. A schoolboy, who a couple of months ago was writing something with chalk on a school board, was turned into an invalid - in the name of the Fuhrer and the Reich. This is not just an anti-war story, but also a harsh, disillusioning critique of the Prussian-style school, where the nationalist ideology put on stilts dominated everything that was taught there, falsely relying on supposedly humanistic German tradition.
Böll's other famous story is The Death of Lohengrin. A teenager tries to steal coal on trains - he needs to feed and warm two little brothers, they are orphans. One day he was caught by security. Trying to escape, he fell off the train. Half-dead ends up in the hospital, covered in blood and coal dust. The doctor tells him to give him an anesthetic injection. The pain passes, and he feels happy, but he thinks about his brothers: without him they will not dare to take bread and will remain hungry. The nun sister asks him his name. "Greeney," he replies. He does not say that his full name is Lohengrin. It was his mother who called him Greenie, but she's dead. He is not baptized, and the nun, having drawn water into a test tube, wants to sprinkle his forehead and perform the rite of baptism. And at that moment he dies.
War and ruins are inseparable in Böll's work. Hungry homeless children huddled in some terrible corners, forced to steal in order to survive, the cruelty of most adults, a cruel world where there is no place for a child with a fabulous name.
Through the eyes of a clown
The most important event both in the creative biography of the writer himself and in the literary life of Germany in those years was the publication of the novel Through the Eyes of a Clown (1963). Perhaps this is the favorite foreign work of Soviet readers of the 60s, as evidenced, in particular, by the staging of 1968 at the Moscow Drama Theater named after the Mossovet, where Gennady Bortnikov played the main role and which was very popular with the audience.
In Germany, the novel caused a mixed reaction. The Catholic Church reacted harshly and even angrily. Relations with the church are a special theme in Böll's work. Christianity for him is primarily a moral category. He understands true faith as true humanity. The ability to love a person, understand his requests and needs - for Böll, this is always the main criterion in assessing a person. The desire to protect the individual from violence is, in his eyes, the highest Christian virtue.
Pious people are often at the center of Böll's works. The Christian theme is closely connected with the problem of responsibility. War, crimes against humanity, disregard for human needs and demands, hypocrisy, heartlessness, prudence, careerism, lies - all this, in the writer's understanding, contradicts Christian morality, is incompatible with it. He accuses the Church, its institutions and higher clergy of "opportunism", of collaborating with Nazism.
Criticism of the official institutions of the church, clerical conformity plays an important role in the novel Through the Eyes of a Clown. Because of the merciless contempt expressed in it for the false, ostentatious piety, hypocrisy and heartlessness of the "fathers of the church", the novel provoked a vicious reaction. The church openly attacked Böll. The Archbishop of Freiburg reproached Böll for "corrupting criticism." One churchman attacked the writer: "Mr. Böll, you offer people stones instead of bread, moreover: obviously, you offer many scorpions instead of bread."
His clerics are written out with the greatest artistic authenticity. Churchmen reveal careerism, vanity, greed and hypocrisy; the true worries and troubles of the parishioners are alien to them. Belle opposes the heartlessness, coldness and conformity of successful clergymen with the morality of pious poor and lonely heroes. The boundary is not between believers and unbelievers, but between moral and immoral people.
The church is completely devoid of holiness in his depiction. Representatives of the "lower" tier of the clergy and modest parishioners are often endowed with high morality and moral strength. Over the years, skepticism about the official institutions of the church has become more noticeable. The writer, in essence, excludes the possibility of Christian renewal.
remember or forget
All his work was built around several main themes. The most important thing remained the rejection of any attempts to push guilt and responsibility for all the atrocities of the Nazi regime to the periphery of public consciousness. He was immensely upset, moreover, outraged by the "inability to mourn", tantamount to ousting the shameful past from the memory of generations.
Acknowledging guilt is hard work, and not everyone was ready for it. The process of ousting the past from memory was ahead of the opposite process of comprehension and analysis. Survivors after the defeat of the Third Reich looked around in confusion: they had to start a new life on a ruined foundation, in a ghostly, almost surreal world of ruins and chaos.
Enlightenment, disillusionment, a vague sense of one's own guilt, attempts to somehow link together the causes and consequences of the catastrophe - such was the self-perception of the Germans at that time, in any case, those who firmly decided to start all over again, breaking with the delusions of the recent past. It was really very difficult, considering how until quite recently the mechanism of fooling and dehumanizing a person worked flawlessly.
Looking into the depths of the abyss and recoiling back in horror, they overcame the painful shock caused by the war and became a trigger for the movement of thought, for new reflections on the catastrophe experienced. Deceived and betrayed by cynical false idols, who senselessly threw millions of lives into the furnace of war, they began to understand how absurdly they had disposed of their youth and youth.
And the theme of being controlled by a person appears again and again in his books - a person who is forced to become a silent "cog" of the system. Böll is always occupied with the question: what can a person oppose to the violence of the state?
A person has no right to hide from responsibility, to hide behind the word "order". He is obliged to resist the criminal regime. The theme of non-involvement in violence, the desire to preserve one's individuality and "innocence of the soul" is one of the main topics in the range of topics of Böll's work. His heroes are not successful people, but standing aside: they do not want to adapt.
His characters hate war and want a simple normal life, they want the love and intimacy of a woman. To use an expression that is not very fashionable today, Böll is a master of subtle psychologism, capable of capturing and transmitting in the finest nuances this subtle music of the soul, which sounds against the background of the rough, brutal chords of war. He accurately reproduces the subtle movements of the soul, so often interrupted by the bloody reality of military everyday life.
At the same time, the tremulous motif of a fleeting meeting often plays the title role in those small tragic performances that are played out in his short early compositions. Love is the main, if not the only, refuge in the midst of a hostile world, which makes it possible to preserve, in spite of everything, human community and firmness of faith.
The orphans and the poor
Heinrich Böll went down in the history of literature as a man who has always been on the side of the “orphans and the poor”, against successful careerists, moneybags, profiting from the troubles of the “common man”.
Böll was arrogantly reproached for the “smell of poverty”, “kitchens where clothes are washed” emanating from his works, and they did not want to understand his warmth of heart and deep sympathy that he had for the crippled, who did not find their place in life. They tried to give the words “literature of the ruins” a negative meaning, even turn them into some kind of curse, but Böll always remained true to his heroes: he longed for society to be more humane, and the state to be more just towards these people.
He believed that the role of literature is not thoughtlessly conformist approval of everything that the authorities do, but, on the contrary, criticism of this authority. Any government will always find something to criticize. And Böll, we must give him his due, widely used this right of literature.
In any situation, he was distinguished by disarming humanity and boundless sincerity. It was this that gave him a reputation throughout the world as a morally impeccable person, and in his own country he was considered the "conscience of the nation." He objected to this as best he could, but he remained the highest "moral authority" to the very end ...
And while I am alive, I will not forget several meetings with this great writer and wonderful person, our conversations, his interest in people and his kindness, willingness to understand and help, his attentive and benevolent look, his charming smile. I have just completed a book on Heinrich Böll and I hope that a publisher will be willing to publish it.
Irina Mlechina,
doctor of philological sciences, —
especially for the new
Julia Tsymbal. The world through the eyes of Heinrich Böll. Feature article; Heinrich Bell. "Then in Odessa." Story; Olga Korolkova. “And I was a soldier ...” (front-line letters from Heinrich Böll)
Materials are printed for the 95th anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Böll
YULIA TSYMBAL
THE WORLD IN THE EYES OF HEINRICH BÖLL
feature article
A world-famous writer, Nobel laureate, progressive figure - Heinrich Böll was called "the conscience of the German people." His novels gained worldwide fame thanks to the subtle psychologism, satirical grotesque and high artistry of their author. The life path of the writer passes during the political disorder of Germany, the birth of fascism and the Second World War. The destruction and annihilation of the individual in the novels of the writer shows the war. Böll acts as an observer of human behavior in extreme conditions. The writer draws images that are real and at the same time grotesquely show the reader.
Heinrich Böll was born in 1917 in Cologne. After graduating from high school, he entered the humanitarian Greco-Roman gymnasium. Refusing to join the Hitler Youth, he was constantly ridiculed by those around him; after graduating from high school, Heinrich Böll abandoned the idea of volunteering for military service and enrolled as an apprentice in one of the Bonn second-hand bookshops. In the spring of 1939, Heinrich Böll entered the University of Cologne, but he failed to start his studies. In July 1939, he was called up for military training of the Wehrmacht, and in the autumn of 1939 the war began. Böll came to Poland, then to France. He fought in Russia, Ukraine, Crimea. He was a corporal on the Eastern and Western fronts. This was followed by four serious wounds in a row, and in 1945 he surrendered to the Americans.
Böll is the first and most popular West German writer whose books have been translated into Russian. He was published in the Soviet Union more than in his homeland, in Germany. "Valley of thundering hooves", "Billiards at half past nine", "Bread of early years", "Through the eyes of a clown" are the most famous of Böll's books translated into Russian. The writer often visited the Soviet Union, visited Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi. However, after Böll came to the defense of Soviet dissidents, in particular A. Solzhenitsyn, I. Brodsky, V. Sinyavsky, Y. Daniel, the government of the Union dramatically changed its attitude towards the writer. In addition, Böll spoke out with sharp indignation against the invasion of Russian tanks in Prague. Böll was no longer published. Only after a long break, during perestroika, in 1985, the writer was again published in the USSR. In the same year, Heinrich Böll died.
Interestingly, one of his best novels, The World Through the Eyes of a Clown, was translated completely incorrectly in the Soviet Union. Or deliberately false.
At the request of the writer, the translation of the novel was checked. It was conducted by the researcher Bogatyrev. He found a lot of inaccuracies and distortions of the text, as a result of which the novel "The World Through the Eyes of a Clown" turned from anti-clerical to anti-religious. Anti-clericality does not deny God, it contains a protest against the church, which imposes its dogmas on the state. A number of Böll's other works were also mistranslated. Böll demanded that his works no longer be published in this form. Naturally, no one began to fulfill his demands, and an international scandal erupted.
Böll's works always contain a subtle psychological game, the transformation and development of an ordinary person into a "lamb" or "buffalo". The new "buffaloes" are more dangerous than the old ones. They have learned mimicry. Otto and the shopkeeper Graetz are ready to betray their own mother in the name of the ideals of fascism. They were transformed into the cynicism of the minister, who "doesn't like guys who still believe in something." But he is ready to use this belief in the election campaign. The fascist Nettlinger now calls himself a democrat by conviction, the concept of "opposition" has become ephemeral - everything is the same for the "right" and "left".
Times don't change...
I recall a book by contemporary Israeli journalist Hannah Arendt about the banality of evil. Hanna was present as a correspondent for The New Yorker at the trial in Jerusalem in 1961 of Adolf Eichmann, a former German officer who collaborated with the Gestapo and was directly responsible for the extermination of about a million Jews. Exploring the motives that motivate ordinary German people to commit crimes, she came to the conclusion that they, being dutiful people, simply carried out orders given to them from above. This banality of stupid execution led to a catastrophe that made the whole world shudder with horror ...
Not everyone knows today that the famous writer visited our city during the war. He described his impressions in the essay "Then in Odessa." Böll, being a military man, along with other soldiers, was preparing for a military operation in the Crimea. Before that, they were landed in Odessa. Just one evening that left an interesting mark on the writer's memoirs...
When reading this essay, a real picture of military Odessa is created through the eyes of Böll. Cold, devastation, wet streets, cobblestone pavement. A group of military men, together with the writer, enter the house where their compatriots are sitting, drinking wine and talking to the girls. The wine, of course, was sour, but everyone drank it, eating, however, "delicious sausages." A soldier sitting in the corner sang the song "Ah, the sun of Mexico", probably so that the warm memories of the sun would allow him to warm up. Here they sold all sorts of little things - pens, lighters, watches, in order to get some more wine and comfort in return.
At the end of the essay, the writer remarks that he will never return to Odessa again ...
In 1987, the G. Böll Foundation was established in Cologne. It is a non-governmental organization that works closely with the Green Party. The Foundation supports projects in the development of civil society, ecology and human rights. Everything that the writer fought for, and all progressive people on earth are fighting for.
_ __ __ _
HEINRICH BÖLL
THEN IN ODESSA
story
Then there was a cold in Odessa. Every morning, in big trucks, we jogged over the cobblestones to the airfield, waited, shivering, until the gray birds taxied to the start, but in the first two days, at the moment when we were already supposed to be loaded, there was an order to cancel the flight due to bad weather - either fog was thickening over the Black Sea, then the sky was covered with clouds, and we again climbed into large trucks and shook along the cobblestones back to the barracks.
The barracks, spacious and dirty, were infested with lice, we crouched somewhere on the floor or sat down at filthy tables and played points, sang something, waiting for the moment to slip behind the fence. A lot of marching formations soldiers gathered in the barracks, and none of them were supposed to enter the city. In the first two days we tried to get away, but it didn’t work, we were caught and as punishment we were forced to carry large cauldrons of hot coffee and unload bread; the commissar-bookkeeper in a sheepskin coat, supposedly intended for the front line, stood and counted the loaves, not allowing us to save anything, and we covered both the account and the accountant he had generated. The sky over Odessa was still both foggy and dark, and the guards were walking like a pendulum back and forth along the black, dirty barracks fence.
On the third day, we waited until it was completely dark, and then we went straight to the main gate, and when the guard detained us, we blurted out to him: "Zelchini's group" and passed by. There were three of us, Kurt, Erich and I, and we walked slowly. It was only four o'clock, but it was already completely dark. We had no other desire than to break through this long, black, dirty fence, and now, having escaped, we almost wanted to return; after all, we were only two months in the army and were afraid of everything, but, on the other hand, we understood that if we found ourselves there again, behind the fence, we would again rush to freedom, and even then we would hardly succeed; besides, it was still only four o’clock, they wouldn’t let us sleep anyway - either lice, or singing, or even our own fear that the weather would be fine tomorrow and we would finally be transferred to the Crimea, to certain death. We didn’t want to die, and we didn’t want to go to the Crimea, but there was no desire to hang around all day in this dirty, black barracks, where there was a smell of surrogate coffee and where bread destined for the front was unloaded all day long, and where commissaries-accounters were on duty in sheepskin coats intended for the front, keeping an eye on that no one hoarded a loaf.
I don't know what we wanted. We just walked slowly along this dark and bumpy outskirts street, between low, unlit houses; fenced off by a dilapidated sparse picket fence, the night froze, and behind it, it seemed, a desert spread, a wasteland, the same as at home, when people, having started building a road, dig a trench, and then change their minds, fill up the moat with waste, ash, garbage, and it again overgrown with grass, tough and wild, lush weeds, and the sign "It is forbidden to dump garbage" is no longer visible, since it was buried under the garbage ...
We walked slowly, because it was still very early. In the dark, we came across soldiers returning to the barracks, and those who went from there drove us away; we were afraid of the patrols and most of all wanted to turn back, but we also knew that in the barracks we would be overcome by despair and that it would be better to be afraid than despair in these black, dirty barracks walls, where pots of coffee are dragged, pots are dragged again and again with coffee, and where they unload bread for the front, again and again bread for the front, under the supervision of commissaries, who jostling in luxurious sheepskin coats, while we are all devilishly cold.
Sometimes in the houses, either to the left or to the right, a yellow-gray light glimmered through the windows and voices were heard - clear and piercing, timid, alien. And then a completely bright window suddenly floated out of the darkness, it was noisy behind it, and we heard the soldiers sing: “Oh, what a sun over Mexico ...”
We pushed the door and went in: we smelled of warmth and smoke, there really were soldiers, about eight or ten people, some were sitting with women, and they were all drinking and singing, and one burst out laughing when he saw us. After all, we were still green, besides, we were all short men, the smallest in the company; our uniforms were brand new, the coarse paper fiber on the sleeves and trousers pricked, and the underpants and shirts tickled bare skin, and the sweaters were brand new, and also prickly.
Kurt, the smallest of us, went ahead and found a table; he was an apprentice in a tannery and told us more than once where the leather was delivered from, although it was a trade secret, he even told us how much they earned from it, although it was a secret of secrets. We sat down next to him.
A woman came out from behind the counter, a black-haired plump woman with a good-natured face, and asked what we wanted to drink; we first asked how much wine costs, because we heard that everything is very expensive in Odessa.
She said, "Five marks a decanter," and we ordered three decanters of wine. We squandered a lot of money on a point; what was left was divided fraternally, each received ten marks. Some of the soldiers not only drank, but also ate; they ate fried meat, still smoking, laid on white bread, and sausages that smelled of garlic; only then it dawned on us that we were hungry, and when the woman brought wine, we asked how much the meal cost. She said sausages cost five marks and meat and bread eight; she also said that it was steam pork, but we ordered three portions of sausages. The soldiers kissed the women, and even pawed them, without embarrassment, we did not know where to go.
The sausages were hot, fatty, and the wine was very sour. We dealt with sausages and did not know what to do next. We had nothing to tell each other, we chatted together on the train for two weeks, and we had already told everything. Kurt was from a leather factory, Erich from a peasant farm, and I was straight from school; we were still scared, but we warmed up ...
The soldiers who were kissing the women took off their belts and went out with the women into the yard; they were three girls with round, pretty faces, they chirped and giggled something, but they set off, now with six soldiers, in my opinion, there were six of them, at least not less than five. Only the drunks were left, who were bawling: “Oh, what a sun over Mexico ...” One of them, standing at the counter, a tall, fair-haired chief corporal, at that moment turned around and neighed again, looking at us; we must have looked, indeed, like in training sessions: we sat quietly and quietly, with our hands folded in our laps. Then the chief corporal said something to the hostess, and she brought us clear schnapps in fairly large glasses.
“We should drink to his health,” Erich said, pushing us with his knee, and I began to shout: “Mr. Corporal!” - and shouted until he realized that I was talking to him, then Erich again pushed us with his knee, we jumped up and shouted in chorus:
- Your health, mister corporal!
The soldiers laughed, but the chief corporal raised his glass and shouted to us:
- Your health, gentlemen grenadiers1 ...
The schnapps was very sharp and bitter, but it warmed us up and we wouldn't mind drinking more.
The fair-haired chief corporal beckoned Kurt with a gesture. Kurt approached him and, having exchanged a few words with the chief corporal, called us over. He said that we are not all at home, since we are sitting without money, we need to push something, that’s all for a short time, then he asked where we were from and where we were heading, and we told him that we were sitting in the barracks, waiting, when it will be possible to fly to the Crimea. He immediately became serious, but said nothing. Then I asked what exactly we could push, and he said: everything.
You can push everything here - an overcoat and a hat, or underpants, a watch, a fountain pen.
We didn’t want to push the overcoat, it was scary - it was forbidden, and we were very cold, then in Odessa. We turned out our pockets: Kurt had a fountain pen, I had a watch, and Erich had a brand new leather wallet he won in the lottery in the barracks. The chief corporal took all three things and asked the hostess how much she could give for them, and she, having carefully examined everything, said that the things were bad and that she could give two hundred and fifty marks for everything, of which one hundred and eighty for one watch.
The chief corporal said that it was not enough, two hundred and fifty, but he also said that she would not give more anyway, and since we were flying to the Crimea tomorrow, we should all be one and we had to agree.
Two of the soldiers who sang "Oh, what a sun over Mexico ..." now got up from the table, went up to the chief corporal and patted him on the shoulder; he nodded to us and went out with them.
The hostess gave me the money, and I ordered each of us two portions of pork with bread and a large schnapps each, and then we ate two more portions of pork and drank each of the schnapps. The meat was fresh and fatty, hot and almost sweet, and the bread was soaked with fat, and we washed it all down with another schnapps. Then the hostess said that she had no meat left, only sausages, and we ate a sausage each, ordered beer for her, thick, dark beer, and then drank more schnapps and asked for cakes, flat, dry cakes made from ground nuts; then we drank schnapps again and could not feel intoxicated at all; but we were warm and pleasant, and we forgot about prickly paper underpants and sweaters and, together with the newly arrived soldiers, sang in chorus: “Oh, what a sun over Mexico ...”
By six o'clock our money ran out, and we were still not drunk; and we went back to the barracks, because we had nothing more to push. On the dark, bumpy street, not a single window was now lit, and when we got to the checkpoint, the guard said that we should go to the guardroom. The guardroom was hot and dry, dirty, smelled of tobacco, and the sergeant major began to yell at us and threatened that we would see the consequences. However, at night we slept very well, and the next morning we were again shaking in large trucks over the cobblestones to the airfield, and it was cold and remarkably clear in Odessa, this time we finally boarded the planes; and when they took off into the air, we suddenly realized that we would never return here, never ...
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1 Grenadiers - so in the Wehrmacht they called ordinary motorized infantry.
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OLGA KOROLKOVA
"... AND I WAS A SOLDIER..."
front-line letters of Heinrich Böll
Copies of H. Bell's letters of 1943-1944 were kindly provided to the Odessa Literary Museum by R. Bell and the G. Böll Archive (Cologne).
Heinrich Böll entered German literature in 1947, and his first works were devoted to the theme of war. Not only because the problem of comprehending far from the most glorious years of German history was extremely relevant for the Böll generation, but also because the only serious life experience of a novice writer was the experience of a soldier.
In the autumn of 1939, Heinrich Böll, a student at the University of Cologne, was called up for active service in the ranks of the Wehrmacht, served in occupied Poland, then in France. Military fate was merciful to Corporal Böll - he did not take part in hostilities. But in the fall of 1943, part of it was transferred to the Eastern Front, to one of the hottest spots - to the Crimea. In the winter of 1943-1944 fierce battles are taking place here, culminating in the Iasi-Kishinev operation victorious for the Soviet Army in August 1944.
The letters of Heinrich Böll, which he writes almost daily to his parents and wife, allow us to restore with great accuracy the circumstances of his stay on the Eastern Front and, in particular, in Odessa: late October-early November 1943 - a military train goes to the Crimea, stopping at small stations; November 10, 1943 - Vinnitsa, from where a unit is delivered by plane to Odessa; November 11, 1943 - by planes, a part is transferred to the Crimea, to the front line; December 2, 1943 - Böll receives a shrapnel wound to the head. The wounded are transported from the medical unit to the medical unit, and then on December 6, 1943, they are delivered to the infirmary in Odessa in a Junkers. An operation was performed, and on December 13, 1943, Böll was transferred to another infirmary, eighty kilometers from the city towards the Romanian border; January 6, 1944 - Böll arrives in Odessa on the Bucharest-Odessa train for a neurological examination, and then he is assigned to the convalescent company; January 12, 1944 - infirmary for the lightly wounded on the border with Romania, from where Böll's path goes further and further to the West.
It is the Eastern Front that becomes G. Böll's first direct encounter with the war. “Someday later I will tell you something about those days when I looked at the war in its real face…” writes Böll in a letter to his wife, Annemarie Böll, on November 14, 1943 (hereinafter H. Böll’s letters are given in our translation - O.K.). Later, he will really tell about this, and not only Annemarie, but all his compatriots, the whole world, in the stories "The Unknown Soldier", "Then in Odessa", "We, the broom knitters", in the story "The train came on time" and in many other works. In 1943-1944, the understanding of the war crystallized, which the writer will carry through his whole life. Böll's front-line letters are an extremely valuable document in this sense. Of particular interest to us are letters from the Eastern Front, since they clearly express the view of the future writer not only on the essence of the war, but also his attitude towards the Russians, towards Russia and, in particular, a very curious perception of our city of Odessa.
War for Böll is fundamentally devoid of any touch of heroism, it is paired in his mind, first of all, with dirt, blood, humiliation of the human in a person, fear that poisons every minute of existence, senseless death of people. “War is cruel, evil and terrible; like animals, we cower in our earthen holes and listen, listen to the fire of artillery, which often almost covers us with heavy calibers .... It seems to me mysteriously sad that mothers should let their sons go to war ... I cling tightly and firmly to the black Russian soil in order to protect my life from deadly iron. Oh, I'm sure nothing will happen to me," writes Böll in a letter to Annemarie on November 19, 1943.
Böll's letters from the Eastern Front are not complaints about the hardships of military life and not a cheerful embellishment of reality to reassure relatives. They are full of very accurate and sober observations of what is happening and the same sober reflections and assessments. At the same time, Böll's letters are imbued with extraordinary warmth towards loved ones, longing for them, a desire to cheer them up and instill in them faith in the successful outcome of all suffering. On January 7, 1944, Böll writes to his parents from Odessa: “... I really believe in God's help and am in constant conviction that I will return to you alive from the horrors of this war. Here you really do not expect absolutely no human help; exclusively everywhere you are left to the will of “chance”. You just need to know that there is no chance, but really every little thing depends on God. Böll is completely alien to the idea of "front-line fraternity", which inspired the writers of the "lost generation" after the First World War. His soldier is alone in his "abandonment" in the terrible whirlwind of war.
This feeling is especially strong in the face of a huge, mysterious and terrible for Böll Russia. The first time he sets foot on Russian soil during the stops of the military train in which he travels to the front. “At the stations where we stop, there is a crazy, colorful fuss, a crazy trade in clothing, watches, lighters .... Russians pay fantastic prices for everything... And it's always wonderful when at a stop you can leave the dungeon of the car to take a breath of air, to see people, really real Russian men and women with bird voices, like your mistress's housekeeper's (letter to parents, November 9, 1943 G.). “Russia, as you see it from the train window, is unspeakably great and sad, a truly fabulous country that is not so easy to “understand”, you have to wait, wait .... Until now, we have always stopped at small rural stations, here people are not yet so broken by hunger. In the countryside, in general, life always retains its natural form ... but sometimes along the way you can see gloomy, pale, miserable, poor proletarians, by whose appearance one can guess what Soviet Russia is ”(letter November 10, 1943). This is Böll's last letter from the road.
Then exhausting battles in the Crimea, a wound and, finally, a respite, a “stop-stop” - a hospital in Odessa await him. “... In this big, dark, very oriental city, I am lying on a wonderful white bed with a wide bandage on my head, which, however, looks more dangerous than it really is,” Böll writes to his parents on December 8, 1943. There is a possibility of something -what to see in this mysterious Russia, even a hospital yard or some streets of the city: “Wide, wide and flat, and white - Russia, this country without fences and walls, without borders is teeming with evil spirits ... I miss the Rhine, Germany so much ... ”(letter to parents, December 31, 1943).
But what is Odessa, seen through the eyes of Corporal Böll (letter to Annemarie, January 7, 1944): “From the station, I had to get to the collection point for the wounded along the streets covered with liquid clay, on which snow fell non-stop, through the “bazaar” - the market . Ah, this crush of the East is so disgusting to me. I had not yet managed to move away from the station, when some frightening-looking tramp wanted to take off my wedding ring for 1200 marks. Before I had time to recover, he put it under a magnifying glass and was frankly delighted with the quality of the gold! Ah, I really felt disgusted. In the bazaar, you can buy anything you want, and you can also sell everything. There is a crazy trade going on between rural and greasy “locals”, each of whom has ten thousand marks in his pocket. You can eat fried sausages as much as you like, you can buy chocolate, cigarettes, bacon, butter, ham, wonderful sunflower oil ..., vodka and radios .... You can eat a Viennese schnitzel cooked with all the sophistication, ah, everything that is generally sold and bought is in this ... "bazaar", which is both heaven and hell at the same time ... - and around, against the background of a dark gray sky, you will see fantastic silhouettes of beautiful towers with onion domes; thick, cozy towers, in which, however, there is something mysteriously demonic. But the most fantastic thing is the houses, dirty yellow facades, from yellow to black, ghostly and exciting, flat roofs, long, long dirty streets, and these yellow facades, so similar and, at the same time, breathtakingly alien to each other. My first thought when I saw these houses was: Dostoevsky! In an exciting way they all came to life before me: Shatov and Stavrogin, Raskolnikov and Karamazov, oh, they were all with me when I looked at their houses. These are their houses… I can understand how in such houses one could discuss for days, ah, years over tea, cigarettes and vodka, forge plans and forget about work…. I am not yet strong enough to express what moves my heart… I only know that I felt that I am a person from the West, and that I yearn, yearn for the West, where “raison” is still preserved. Here, in the “hospital district”, there is a boundless colony of strong, solid, beautiful, but a little tasteless box houses ... just like our boxes for children's blocks! Scattered between them are neglected fields and barracks; and everything, everything without fences and walls, this is the first and most striking thing, especially if you come directly from France; there, every insignificant patch of land is surrounded by a ridiculously high wall, but here everything is free, large and boundless ... In France, you can feel fear when entering a house, but here fear seizes you at the sight of flat, boundless fields that are “free” for everything! !!
Böll argues from the point of view of a “man of the West”, therefore Odessa for him is the city of Dostoevsky and, at the same time, a city of vast spaces. Böll does not see the real originality of Odessa, and it is understandable in his situation.
And yet Odessa, Russia in general, is mysterious for Böll, unknowable by reason, frighteningly alien, but not hostile! For him, there is no enemy here, which is not quite usual for a soldier who shoots himself and who is shot at. In a letter to Annemarie on November 21, 1943 from the Crimea, Böll admits: “Passing by every dead person, whether he is German or Russian, I have accustomed myself to say quietly: “God bless your soul!” And at the end of his life, in 1985, in the essay “A Letter to My Sons, or Four Bicycles,” he writes: “... I have not the slightest reason to complain about the Soviet Union. The fact that I was sick there several times, was wounded there, is inherent in the “nature of things”, which in this case is called war, and I always understood that we were not invited there ... Soldiers - and I was a soldier - should complain about the wrong people. against whom they were sent to fight, but only against those who sent them to war.”1
By 1985, Böll was leading a long path of humanistic searches and assertions. But we can rightfully assume that this path began already in the forties of the war years and, not least, on the Eastern Front.
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1 Foreign literature. - 1985. - No. 12. - P. 221-222
