"Aphrodite", unknown sculptor, Hermitage. "Friends, heroes of the Achaeans, fearless servants of Ares!"

Was it the cause of the Trojan War? In any case, she ruined the life of more than one man and not one woman.

About beauty Helena of Troy, which was also called the Beautiful, many legends and myths are composed. The poets of that time claimed that "Helen's beauty is capable of filling a thousand sails." They fought for her, wars flared up because of her, brave heroes took risky actions in order to win the beauty's heart.

Who is she

The most beautiful woman in the Oikumene (that is, in the inhabited world), according to ancient Greek myths, - Elena, daughter Tyndarea who reigned in Sparta. And immediately disagreements and contradictions begin. Many myth writers claim that Helena was born Ledoy, the wife of Tyndareus, not from her lawful husband, but from Zeus- the supreme god, the ruler of Olympus.

Already in childhood, Elena was so beautiful that people came to her to marry from afar. The fame of Elena's beauty spread everywhere.

Her appearance

Strange, but nowhere, not in any legend, even in the famous Iliad Homer, No detailed description Elena's appearance. Everyone repeats in one voice - "the most beautiful", but what this beauty consisted of - they do not specify! The only detail- similarity with the goddesses.

To some extent, Elena's appearance can be judged by a sculptural image, the author of which is Antonio Canova, as well as other images. And here comes the time to be surprised. Large straight nose with almost no nose bridge. Too strongly curved lips. Upturned chin. Yes, and the chest is far from generally accepted standards - in any case, its size. A tightly built figure, rather powerful legs...

And is this the ideal? An object of admiration for men and envy of women?

However, there is nothing surprising: these were the canons at that time. female beauty. Dense, with strong legs? This means that she is hardy, will be able to give birth to healthy children and work hard for the family. Nose not like this? Which one then? Others in Greece simply did not know.

How and where was born

On this issue, myth-makers also do not show unanimity. There are at least three versions.

Euripides He talked about the fact that Elena was conceived and born by Leda from Zeus, - they say, that is why the girl was born inhumanly beautiful, like a goddess.

According to Ptolemy, the father of Elena the Beautiful was another god - Helios.

Finally, the most misterious story tells that in fact Zeus seduced not Leda at all - an earthly woman, the queen of Sparta, but the goddess Nemesis. At the same time, he assumed the form beautiful swan. As a result mutual love Zeus and Nemesis an egg was born - he put it on Leda's knees Hermes. Leda accepted the gift and began to raise Elena as her own daughter.

Who kidnapped her

The incredible beauty of Elena forced Tyndareus to put guards on her daughter. And yet there was a fan who did not stop. When Elena was 12 years old (according to some sources - only 10), she was kidnapped by Theseus. He settled Elena with his mother, and he went on another journey to accomplish another feat.

And again, contradictions. Some sources say that Elena was subsequently returned home by her brothers, while she remained an untouched virgin. According to other sources, she gave birth to a daughter from Theseus, named her Iphigenia and left the girl in Mycenae with her sister.

Second husband - Menelaus

After Elena was returned home, her father decided to marry her to Menelaus. New spouse took Elena the Beautiful to his home. Soon she bore him a daughter Hermione. And everything would be fine if the handsome man had not come to visit them. Paris from Troy - Elena lost her head when she saw him.

And everything is to blame - the dispute of the goddesses about which of them is the most beautiful. Argued about it Hera, Athena and Aphrodite. And Paris was called to judge the dispute. He gave the famous apple of discord to Aphrodite - one of the goddesses who promised to bring confusion and make the most beautiful woman on earth, that is, Elena, fall in love with Paris.

Helen's third lover - Paris

But Paris was married. And his wife is a soothsayer oenone- dissuaded him from going to Sparta, predicting all sorts of troubles from a meeting with Elena. And it turned out to be right.

Menelaus left for a sacrifice in Crete. Lovers - Helen and Paris - took advantage of his absence to escape to Troy. Of course, Menelaus did not want to put up with such an insult - he rushed in pursuit along with his associates. Thus, the famous Trojan War was unleashed, in which numerous city-states of Greece participated. Troy was besieged for 10 years. Paris almost did not participate in battles - he evaded dangers. Outraged, Elena called him a coward and later, when Paris died, she did not even begin to mourn.

But the windy beauty did not return to her lawful husband either. She married Deiphoba- brother of Paris. However, Menelaus quickly killed him and took his unfaithful wife home, forgiving her all her sins.

Bust "Helen of Troy" (1812, Venice, Palazzo Albrizzi). In her wonderful marble is light, She is above the sinful forces of the earth - That nature could not do What Beauty and Canova could do! Her mind is not destined to comprehend, The art of the bard in front of her is dead! Immortality is given to her as a dowry - She is the Elena of your heart! Lord Byron (25 November 1816) Translation - A. M. Argo

Antonio Canova / Canova, Antonio (1757 - 1822) is an Italian sculptor and painter. Major Master neoclassicism in European sculpture, a role model for 19th-century academics (like Thorvaldsen). The largest collections of his works are in the Louvre in Paris and in the Petersburg Hermitage. Between 1814 and to 1822 Canova creates a series of portrait busts. In them, he embodied his ideas about citizenship, moral ideals, sublime beauty human spirit as a true heir to the aesthetic ideals of the Enlightenment. Along with portrait busts, the master created and the so-called "ideal heads". For example, "Helen of Troy". Lord Byron saw this bust in the house of Countess d "Albrizzi in Venice. Conquered by the beauty of the work, he wrote a poem "To the bust of Helena, sculpted by Canova" (1816). It was first published in the 2nd volume of the Life, Letters and Diaries of Lord Byron published by Thomas Moore in 1830. In a letter to Murray dated November 25, 1816, in which this poem was, Byron wrote: “Helena of Canova, undoubtedly, in my opinion, the most perfect creation of human genius in beauty, far leaving my ideas of creative possibilities person."

Music: Joel Goldsmith - Helen on Display (Elena Troyanskaya, 2003)

Paris, the kidnapper of the beautiful Helen, the culprit of the Trojan War, Canova portrays as a pampered narcissistic youth. He stands in a casual pose, leaning lightly on a tree stump. His slender body arched lazily, his lips slightly touched by a smile. Canova's contemporaries believed that this statue, made by him for Napoleon's wife Josephine, was worthy to stand next to the most beautiful ancient monuments.

Paris is the son of King Priam of Troy. Before the birth of Paris, his mother Hekaba saw nightmare: she saw how the fire threatened to destroy all of Troy. Frightened, Hekaba told her dream to her husband. Priam turned to the soothsayer, and he said that Hekaba would have a son who would be responsible for the death of Troy. Therefore, Priam, when a son was born to Hekaba, ordered his servant Agelay to take him to the high Ida and throw him there in the forest thicket. However, the child escaped - he was fed by a bear. A year later, Agelay found him and raised him as his own son, calling him Paris. Paris grew up among the shepherds and became an unusually beautiful young man. He stood out among his peers with strength. Often he saved not only herds, but also his comrades from the attack of wild animals and robbers, and became so famous among them for his strength and courage that they called him Alexander (affecting husbands).

Canova's sculpture was also very popular for its virtuosity. His works are graceful and decorative. Speaking of Canova's sculpting, J.K. Argan notes that it is “deeply contrasting, torn, as if consisting of intensely illuminated small protruding planes and deep, almost black depressions. light, while perception does not depend on changing conditions, but on the force with which the form affects visual perception.The form of a real thing interested him so little that he achieved a stronger light effect than was necessary, based on the nature of the material. It is useless to try to separate the figure from the surrounding space with which it is merged: there is nothing constant in "perception", its conditions are changeable, just as the ratio of structure and image, object and space is changeable.

And another of the constant and outstanding qualities of Canova is highlighted by Argan - "this is the accuracy of the distance, which the viewer likes so much, his perception of the figure and space as a whole, as an unchanging form based on his own and unchanging attitude to natural reality. From any point of view , in any light, the value of the sculpture, and, consequently, the value will always be the same.
During his lifetime, Canova had a reputation as the most significant of the sculptors of modern times. In the development of classic sculpture, he played the same key role that David played in the development of classic painting. Contemporaries did not spare strong epithets to describe their admiration for the gift of Canova, who, as it seemed then, could stand comparison with the best sculptors of antiquity. His tombstones are spectacular, his portraits are idealized. Nevertheless, neither the “solemn calmness of the composition” nor the “clarity and elegance of proportions” saved Canova from accusations of “cold abstraction of images, sentimental sweetness and salon prettiness, lifelessness of the smooth, polished surface of marble”, which were brought against him by many later art historians. and, in particular, the authors of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.

Greece is the only country for the sake of traveling to which he decided to leave the British Isles, not counting the crossing of the English Channel in the First World War. And it was not just a trip, but something like honeymoon under the wing of death - the trip was planned in romantic period, when fatal disease Lewis's wife retreated briefly, and shortly before departure it became known that the disease had returned.

Lewis wrote enthusiastic letters from there, he felt the breath of that Hellas, which he knew so well. In his letters, he says that in Delphi he prayed to Christ sub specie Apollinis, "in the form of Apollo" - in these words there is a lot of Lewis's theology of the image.

There are many ancient motifs in The Chronicles of Narnia, written in the 50s, and leaving teaching, Lewis planned to devote himself to translating the Aeneid, which he had been doing snatches all his life. Among these “projects” inspired by antiquity or closely related to it, a fragment published posthumously entitled “After ten years” occupies a special place.

This is one of the last, and possibly the last piece of art Lewis. At the very beginning of the 60s, he complained about the loss creative inspiration required for storytelling. According to him, he stopped "seeing pictures", but he does not know how to invent. That is why in these years he focuses on translations and essays.

According to friends, Lewis thought about writing a novel about Helen of Troy in the 50s. The original version of the first chapter was written in 1959, even before the trip to Greece.

The fragment is quite small, smaller than the author's sheet, but extremely interesting and rich in content. The story begins with a scene in a cramped and dark space. Main character, we know that his name is Golden-headed, tightly squeezed between others like him in complete darkness - a real allegory of the state on the eve of birth.

Soon the hero gets out, and we understand that in front of us is Menelaus, the king of Sparta (Golden-Headed is his epithet in Homer), he was sitting in the belly of a wooden horse, and the thing is happening in the besieged Troy.

A description of the battle within the walls of the city follows, interesting with allusions to Homer and Virgil, but Menelaus, in the midst of the battle, keeps returning to Helen in his thoughts. Soon he will find her, what he dreamed about for ten long years will happen. In the head of Menelaus, voluptuous dreams and plans for cruel revenge are fighting - here we have a not too familiar "Lewis for adults". He breaks into the royal chambers, where a woman is sitting with her back to him, sewing.

Menelaus catches himself thinking that only one in whose veins flows the blood of the gods can behave in such a way in the face of mortal danger. Without turning around, the woman says, “Girl. She is alive? She's fine?" - Elena asks about Hermione, their daughter, and Menelaus understands that all his constructions of the last ten years are crumbling.

However, this is not the main shock. When Elena nevertheless turns to him, it turns out that these ten years have not passed without a trace for her - she is no longer the most beautiful of women.

“He never imagined that she could change so much - the skin under her chin is slightly noticeable but still sag, her face becomes puffy and tired, gray hairs appear on her temples, and wrinkles appear in the corners of her eyes. It looks like she's even gotten shorter. The beautiful whiteness and smoothness of her skin, which previously made her arms and shoulders appear to radiate radiance, was gone. Before him sat an aging woman, sad and submissive, who had not seen her daughter for a long time; their daughter".

After the battle in the Achaean camp, Agamemnon explains to his brother that such Helen cannot be shown to the troops. This is not the one for which they were led to death. (However, the real reasons for the war are political, the abduction of Elena became an extremely successful pretext to go to war on dangerous competitor- says Agamemnon.) Menelaus with Elena and the Spartans, who consider her their queen, need to leave the coast of Asia Minor as soon as possible.

Among other things, in Lewis here you can see an interesting metaphor for the possession of a shrine. Menelaus thinks bitterly that everyone except him, her lawful husband, has rights to his wife. Some idolize her, others revere her as a queen, others use her in a political game, others want to sacrifice to the gods. And he doesn't even feel a free man who can dispose of his property is nothing more than an inevitable appendage to the daughter of Zeus, even the rights to the Spartan throne belong to him only as Elena's husband.

The last scene is a conversation in Egypt with local priests. The priests convince Menelaus that the daughter of Zeus has never been to Troy. The gods played a joke on him, they love to joke. The one who shared a bed with Paris was a phantom, a ghost ("such creatures sometimes appear on earth for a while, no one knows what they are"), and the true Helen - now Menelaus will see her ...

“Musicians have stopped playing. Slaves were scurrying around. They moved all the lamps to one place, in the far part of the temple chambers, to a wide doorway, so that the rest of the huge room was plunged into twilight and Menelaus peered painfully into the radiance of closely arranged lamps. The music played again.

- Daughter of Leda, come out to us! – said the old man.

And at the same moment it happened. From the darkness behind the doorway

Here Lewis's manuscript breaks off. Friends persistently asked him what Menelaus saw, and which of the Helens was real. But Lewis repeated that he did not know, did not see this scene, and did not want to write from the head.

It is interesting that in this fragment and in the idea of ​​the story of Helen, as far as it can be reproduced, Lewis works with myth and with the ancient plot in the same way as the ancient authors did. Taking one or another well-known plot as a basis, the same tragedians mainly only offered their own explanations of the motives, guided by which the heroes made well-known decisions.

Here we see just such an approach. According to Homer, Menelaus and his army really left Troy before the others, this was indeed preceded by a quarrel with Agamemnon, and even Menelaus' worries about his worthlessness are justified by ancient material - he received the rights to the Spartan throne only through Helen, daughter of the Spartan king Tyndareus.

Such work with the material is generally characteristic of Lewis. In the story “Until We Have Found Faces,” he, too, strictly speaking, simply retells the story of Cupid and Psyche from Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, thinking almost nothing of himself, except for the nuances.

The most interesting thing is that even using the ancient plot as the basis for a story about spiritual experience, the author relies on a rich tradition. “Metamorphoses” is a story about a mystical experience, dressed in the form of a frivolous adventure novel (or disguised as one), and an inserted short story about Cupid and Psyche is its semantic center, always perceived as an allegory of the ordeals of the human soul.

Undertaking to retell this story, Lewis turns out to be the continuer of the tradition in which, besides Apuleius, such authors as Marcianus Capella, Fulgentius and Boccaccio worked.

In taking up the legend of Helen, Lewis also draws on a serious and full-flowing tradition. The version that instead of Helen in Troy was her ghost (likeness, εἴδωλον - a concept dating back to Plato and developed in the Neoplatonic tradition) is not at all an invention of a modern author.

The legend that Helen has never been to Troy goes back to the "Palinody" of Stesichorus, a Greek lyric poet of the 6th century, and is apparently associated with the cult of Helen as a deity. According to legend, Stesichorus wrote poems about Elena, where, following Homer, he accused her of betraying her husband and called her the culprit of the war. For this, the poet was stricken with blindness, after which he wrote a “counter song”, saying that he was wrong, and in Troy, in fact, there was only the ghost of Helen, while the real Helen was in Egypt all the time of the Trojan War.

About a hundred years later, the famous historian Herodotus visited Egypt, who talked there with the priests, who told him that, indeed, Elena lived there, and she and Paris did not reach Troy due to a storm.

A few decades later, this plot was given the most complete form by Euripides in the tragedy "Helen". According to Euripides, Helen's εἴδωλον, who was in Troy, was created by Hera to save Helen. The tragedy begins with how Menelaus, on his way home from Troy, finds himself in Egypt and meets his wife - at this moment the ghost that accompanied him flies away, returning to the ether from which he was woven.

It is no coincidence that this tradition uses the word εἴδωλον, akin to the basic concept of Plato's philosophy - this is a very Greek train of thought. Actually, we are talking about the fact that the ideal cannot be involved in the "low life". The real Elena is divine, she cannot be a traitor, she cannot be a source of misfortune, she is virtuous and perfect.

In fact, the well-known hooligan, atheist and subverter of authority Euripides - and his predecessors - do not undermine the tradition at all. The version of the immaculate Helen and the Trojan ghost is just as natural its development as Plato's idealism is the development of early Greek philosophy. Elena as an ideal accompanies the European literary tradition(however, not forgetting about Helen the harlot - see the Fifth canticle of Dante's "Hell"), in late XIX centuries, finding expression, for example, in the novel by Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang "The Wanderer" (The World's Desire).

But most interestingly, what was on Lewis's mind, how was he going to solve the dilemma of the two Helens? Although Lewis himself emphasized in every possible way that he did not know the continuation of the intended plot, the main twist is quite obvious. It follows from the whole work of Lewis, all the features of his processing of old subjects and their transformation. And this case is even especially eloquent.

Whenever rethinking ancient, especially pre-Christian material, Lewis tries to see it in a Christian perspective (to worship Christ sub specie Apollinis).

For Lewis, this is not a purposeful Christianization, but an attempt to see the relative from a universal point of view. He works with his sources extremely seriously, taking not meanings that lie on the surface, but deeply thinking through their potencies and intentions. He tries to give the myth a voice, to understand, in the language of Aristotle, that this or that plot “can” and what it “wants”.

It turns out, as when reworking the story of Cupid and Psyche, Platonic (and Platonic) motifs in Narnia, Dante and Miltonian motifs in the Cosmic Trilogy, Lewis tries to tear them away from the context determined by the era and test them for strength in a universal coordinate system.

And it turns out that Dionysianism, fauns, Arthurian legends and Platonic dialogues are quite compatible with Christianity, but modern science when she forgets about ethics, no. A similar turn, apparently, Lewis was going to make in the story of Helen.

Judging by everything we know about the Lewis method, "After ten years" should have become Euripides' "Helen" in reverse. Beautiful and divine, not knowing old age, torment, not changing Helen, which Egyptian priests show to Menelaus is a ghost and an obsession, a projection of the dreams of the Spartan king. And having lost its former beauty, but the real Trojan prisoner is his real wife, and most importantly - it is she, not ideal, but alive - the love of his life. The difficult path of Menlai to the understanding of this wisdom was to become the plot of the story.

This version, in the afterword to the publication of the fragment, is also supported by Lewis's friend, the writer and literary historian Roger Lancelin Green, who discussed the idea of ​​the story with Lewis and accompanied them with Joy on a trip to Greece.

“Menelaus dreamed of Elena, yearned for her, created her image in his thoughts and worshiped him as a false idol. In Egypt, this very idol was shown to him, εἴδωλον ... He was to find out in the end that the elderly and faded Helen, whom he brought from Troy, was real, and between them was real love or its possibility; while εἴδωλον would be belle dame sans merci…”(meaning the image from poem of the same name John Keats - a ruthless beauty, a haze from the world of fairies).

But perhaps the most surprising thing here is that in this story Lewis, more unwittingly than deliberately, repeats the legend of Stesichorus with its song and countersong. This concerns the rethinking, or rather the adjustment, of two very important topics for Lewis - romantic love and Platonism.

Lewis knew the romantic love tradition better than others, in which earthly love is not just a feeling, but a reflection and image of divine love. He himself did not escape her charm when he wrote a book about the allegorical love tradition and, later, when, under the influence of the “romantic theology” of Charles Williams, he developed the theme of love of the first people before the fall of Milton.

All the more remarkable is the rather sober look at this feeling in the book "Love", written just when Lewis, having married, was able to try on the "romantic model" for himself.

“When I wrote about medieval poetry many years ago,” says Lewis in the section on falling in love, “I was so blind that I took the cult of love as a literary convention. Now I know that falling in love requires a cult by its very nature. Of all kinds of love, she, on her heights, is most like God and always strives to turn us into her servants. “If we worship her unconditionally,” he adds, “she will become a demon.”

Lewis's Platonism is an undeservedly under-researched topic. Meanwhile, this is perhaps the main key to his theology and worldview in general. This world is like an imperfect likeness of the Kingdom of God, the country of Aslan or the real Narnia, Paradise from the "Dissolution of Marriage", the sea to which our parents want to take us, while we are digging in a puddle.

Like no one who appreciated the beauty of the intellectual construction, Lewis could not help but use the Platonic model, although he made reservations every now and then about its difference from Christianity. But in last years he seriously corrects his position, although he does not abandon his previous constructions. AT later works the theme of God as the destroyer of the images we build in order to cognize Him, but as a result obscure the Antitype, sounds distinctly. Sometimes this theme is so pronounced that the reader gets the impression that Lewis has been losing faith in recent years. But it is not. It is an energetic impulse from concepts to the Living God.

“Perhaps images are useful, otherwise they would not be so popular,” Lewis writes in Exploring Grief, compiled from diaries he kept immediately after his wife’s death. (It doesn't really matter if we're talking about pictures and statues of the outside world or creations of our imagination.) And yet, to me, their harm is much more obvious. Images of the sacred are amazingly easily transformed into sacred images, which means they become inviolable.

But my ideas about God are by no means divine ideas. They just need to be smashed to smithereens from time to time. And He Himself does this, for He Himself is the greatest Iconoclast. It may even be one of the signs of His presence. The Incarnation is an extreme example of the iconoclasm of God; it leaves no stone unturned from all previous ideas about the Messiah.”

But what is especially striking in the light of what we know about the intention of the Trojan tale is the following passage from the second notebook of diaries published as a book Exploring Sorrow. Previously disparate themes suddenly come together in a single picture - both the iconoclastic theology of Lewis, and the theme of marriage as a meeting with reality, and even those very “ten years” that served as the title of the fragment.

But the most striking, and perhaps, on the contrary, natural and logical, when reading Lewis's diaries dedicated to his wife, we remember that her name was also Elena - Helen Joy Davidman - and that is how Lewis calls her in the diary. (I thank Boris Kayachev for reminding me of this place in the diaries, a fragment of which is given in his translation.)

“Already now, less than a month after her death, I feel the process slowly, stealthily beginning to turn the Helen I think of into an increasingly imaginary woman. Accustomed to proceeding from facts, I certainly will not mix anything fictitious into them (or I hope I will not). But won't their combination into a whole image inevitably become more and more my own? There is no longer that reality that could hold me back, sharply besiege me, as Helen often did - so unexpectedly and so completely being herself, and not me.

The most valuable gift that my marriage gave me was this constantly tangible presence of something very close and dear, but at the same time unmistakably different, stable - in a word, real. Is it all going to die now? Is the fact that I will still continue to call Helen, now mercilessly dissolved among my bachelor fantasies? Oh, my dear, my dear, come back just for a moment and drive away this pitiful ghost! Oh, God, God, why did You force this creature to come out of its shell with such effort, when now it is doomed to crawl - to be sucked - back in?

Today I was to meet a man whom I had not seen for ten years. And all this time I thought that I remember him well - how he looked and talked and what he talked about. The first five minutes of communication with real person shattered this image. Not that he has changed. Against. The thought constantly jumped in my head: “Yes, yes, of course, of course, I forgot that he thought this, or did not like that; that he was familiar with such and such, or that he threw his head back in this way.

All these features were once familiar to me, and as soon as I met them again, I recognized them. But in my memory they were all erased in his portrait, and when he himself appeared in their place, the overall impression was strikingly different from the image that I had carried in myself for these ten years. How can I hope the same doesn't happen to my memory of Helen? What is not happening already?

Slowly, silently, like snowflakes - the way small flakes fall when it is going to snow all night - little flakes of myself, my feelings, my preferences, cover her image. The true outlines will eventually be completely hidden. Ten minutes—ten seconds—of the real Helen could fix everything. But even if those ten seconds were given to me, in another second the little flakes would start falling again. The sharp, sharp, cleansing taste of her otherness was gone.”

If the reconstruction of the idea of ​​the story about Elena that we propose is correct, we have before us an incredibly beautiful rethinking of the themes of romantic love and Platonic idealism. In some ways, even more beautiful than in "Until We Have Found Faces." There, fears and superstitions are destroyed by meeting with God. Here, the tale of perfect love is shattered—or tested—by meeting one's own wife.

Delphi, May 2015