Human limitations of the mind. Marcel Duchamp

Magazine "blue sofa"

"Machine and Woman": philosopher Oleg Aronson on the non-art of Marcel Duchamp

In his works, the classic of the French avant-garde with equal success avoids both abstract concepts and sensual unbridledness, trying to capture that mysterious “super-thin” that is on the periphery of our perceptual apparatus. The key to the essence of the readymade is the machinery of chess - the main hobby of the famous artist-provocateur. T&P publishes an article by the philosopher Oleg Aronson, published in the 18th issue of the Blue Sofa magazine.

The "not" principle

Let's start with two phrases. They belong to Marcel Duchamp, who, as you know, did not skimp on interviews and comments on his own work. Of his many provocative judgments, we will dwell on only two for now, since, as it seems to me, they set the necessary parameters that allow one to become a spectator of Duchamp's works, that is, according to the artist, not just to perceive, but to cooperate with the author in a special way. Of course, we could not quote any quotes at all. And perhaps, for a viewer ready to collaborate with one of the most radical artists of the 20th century, such a path would be possible. He could be different, but sooner or later he would lead the viewer (one wants to call him “ideal”) to what Duchamp is talking about. These could be other phrases of Duchamp, which, perhaps, would have turned out to be much more significant for this viewer. Nevertheless, by immediately setting the coordinates of Duchamp's perception by his own judgments, we do not in any way seek to discover some of his "truth" or "meaning". This is just one of the ways that the artist himself offers and which consists in not only being another of his interpreters, but giving him the opportunity from the century of the past to answer some questions of our time.

So two sentences. First: "I'm not an artist, I'm a chess player." The second one: "Ready-made itself is not art, its discussion becomes art."

I have chosen these phrases because they concentrate several plots at once, allowing us to grasp a certain principle of Duchamp's existence as an artist whose interpretations of his work are innumerable and whose influence is still great.

The subjects that are touched upon in these phrases are what Duchamp constantly discusses throughout his life: the relationship between art and chess, the relationship between art and language (as well as the world), as well as the moment that Duchamp himself sometimes called "fear repetition” and which is expressed here by the particle word “not”, which in this case does not mean negation, but expresses something else. Maybe an interruption or a kind of withdrawal, a side step.

The desire to do something different from what is expected of him haunted Duchamp all his life. It seemed to him that at the very moment of stylistic repetition he was already beginning to participate in the production of the art that he himself was trying to change. From his first paintings to his most recent installations and performances, he entered into a variety of alliances and tried many artistic techniques. He has works in the style of Cezanne, and in the technique of cubism, and close to the aesthetics of Italian futurism, not to mention surrealism. At the same time, he seemed to have passed tangentially past all these directions, without becoming either a Cubist, or a Surrealist, or a Dadaist. This important point his escapism says more about what one might call him the "not" principle than about what we extract from a single phrase, even if it is significant and programmatic.

Duchamp is constantly striving to convey the sensual dimension of what was thought of as pure abstraction.

What is the "not" principle, which is so easy to immediately interpret as negation? This principle is not contained in the language, when the syntactic use of the particle leads to the necessary semantic consequences. Rather, the particle here is only a pointer - it shifts attention from one area of ​​production of meaning to another. The phrase "I am not an artist" does not mean at all that "I refuse to be an artist", or "I stop doing art", or "do not judge strictly, I am an amateur." This is not a pose or false modesty. This would be possible if we weren't talking about chess. Chess not only occupied a large place in Duchamp's life, perhaps this place can even be considered the main one. It so happened that he became famous as an artist, and therefore his "main" became historically insignificant. Especially since great success in chess he did not achieve. When Duchamp says “I am a chess player”, he hints at the way his artistic statement is made: treat my object not as if it were made by an artist, but as if it were made by a chess player. It is in this approach that the principle of “not” is concluded: “not” is not an opposition, not a negation, not a logical quantifier, not a dialectical contradiction, not everything. But then what? And why is it, this “not”, so necessary? Why can it be considered a principle?

Duchamp at the chessboard, photograph by Alexander Lieberman, 1959

The second phrase about ready-made gives a hint. Today, art history has gradually learned to talk about ready-made, but when Duchamp exhibited his first ready-made objects, such as the famous urinal or bottle dryer, in the 10s of the last century, neither the audience nor the art community were up to it. ready. And there was no language for describing such works. It is quite natural that there was both indignation and admiration; they interpreted it both as a provocation of the artistic community and as shocking the viewer. Meanwhile, Duchamp himself was far from such interpretations, which just insist on opposition and denial. His idea was to capture the processes in art, which, as he himself said, go beyond sensory perception, but remain a necessary component of aesthetic experience.

This means that Duchamp's "not" is an indication of such a change that fixes the situation of art becoming non-art. Or you can put it another way: it is important for him to find a space through which art changes the essence imposed on him. Proceeding from this, it can be quite consistently argued that ready-made does not argue with what an object of art is, does not play with the conventions of the exhibition and museum space, but only becomes a new artistic technique that came from a world artificially separated from the world of art. By the way, Thierry de Duve draws attention to this when he shows that Duchamp's ready-made does not cease to be correlated with painting.

In such a situation, art is each time not provided with anything: it is doomed to be non-art and must learn from new teachers who had never been involved in art in any way before. For Duchamp, this is chess. Chess for him is not only a model of a new art, but also a new type of relationship between the artist and his object. “Not all artists are still chess players, but all chess players are already artists,” he said, and we will try to follow his logic.

Chess versus art

When Duchamp calls chess an art, this is a far cry from those boring platitudes that have become especially popular in the last half century, when chess has finally become professionalized. It has become self-evident that chess is a fusion of sport, science and art. However, in those years when Duchamp participated in tournaments, the attitude towards chess was somewhat different. Firstly, there were practically no players who could earn their living solely by playing chess tournaments. Chess was primarily a hobby, a free pastime. There was no institution behind them, and although the International Chess Federation already existed, its role was insignificant. Powerful institutionalization and commercialization of chess began only after World War II. At the same time, in the 1920s and 1930s, when Duchamp played in tournaments, chess was in a situation of primarily qualitative changes. Until recently, there was talk of a “draw death” threatening chess, where a technical positional style of play reigned, which looked boring and scared away the spectators. And now a new direction has appeared, called “hypermodernism” by the well-known grandmaster Savely Tartakover. Duchamp was also close to Tartakower (this conclusion can be drawn not only because he was friends with the chess player, but primarily on the basis of the few games he invented, the records of which have come down to us).

The ideas of hypermodernism were expressed in articles and books by Nimzowitsch and Reti. The old principles of positional play developed by Tarrasch and Steinitz have undergone major changes. The easiest way to express them is as follows: instead of a set of technical instructions for the game, depending on one or another type of position, such concepts as “blockade”, “pressure”, “weakness” were introduced into everyday life. In the games of the hypermodernists, the pawns did not occupy the center, the pieces did not seem to be striving for activity, maneuvering slowly and, it would seem, not creating threats to the opponent. The calculation was made that the enemy, acting actively, would inevitably weaken some fields, which would become a place of pressure and blockade. In fact, such a game assumed that there is a position represented on the board, in its material appearance, and one, perspective, that has already been outlined by force lines of pressure. Duchamp constantly emphasized that it was the second position, invisible but experienced intellectually, that constituted the basis of the beauty of chess. These two positions, one in this moment on the board, and the other is an intellectual clot of pressures, forces, energies, threats that have not yet been realized in any specific version - this is the dynamics that Duchamp called "mechanical sculpture", noting the moment of machineness inherent in chess itself as a game , and the fact that machineness appears here not as an automaton acting according to the rules, but as a mechanism for transforming one perception into another.

Marcel Duchamp playing chess in Toronto, 1968

Actually, mechanics (and mathematics) for Duchamp suggests a different understanding of technology (and, consequently, what is called “craft” in art), when technology ceases to be a tool, becoming instead a way of manifesting new relationships between objects, between man and the world, between people. Chess is perceived by Duchamp as a model in which the abstract and the sensual are intertwined and inextricably linked, and in this mechanical interweaving of them, their very distinction is called into question. What is attractive and even eroticized in chess for Duchamp is the relationship that is brought into the area, which is considered as the zone of abstraction. But about the same, many mathematicians can say about numbers, infinite sets, and some formulas. Like Nabokov's Luzhin and Duchamp, many mathematicians "feel" and "experience" mathematical abstractions as a sphere of action of energies, forces, stresses, and not at all as the mechanics of formal proofs.

Duchamp is constantly striving to convey the sensual dimension of what was thought of as pure abstraction. But art is conservative - it is focused on the gaze and pleasure of the viewer, on works and their cult. All this needs to be suspended in order to open up a space of a different type of perception. Ready-made, exhibited as a customary work, precisely because of its perceptual completeness (we have a thing always already perceived) brings into the exhibition space those relations (everyday, social, sometimes very personal), without which this thing is unthinkable in the life outside the gallery, where it not just an object of perception, but it materializes the most diverse relationships between people.

In a sense, we can say that in art, which has become an institution, acquired its own production, its own market and its own cult, Duchamp tried to introduce what was lost along with it, but what was preserved, for example, in chess - idleness and unprofessionalism. However, for this, it was first necessary to find a zone free from art - non-art, or in art itself to reveal its potential to be non-art. Departing from traditional plastic forms, Duchamp tries to discover the unknown sensuality of abstraction. And even more - he is trying to catch in the abstract a certain sexual dimension.

Marcel Duchamp, Chess Game, 1910

Everything starts with chess. The picture of 1910 is called “The Chess Game”. Many researchers believe that Cezanne is stylistically guessed in it, and even the very specific painting “Card Players”. Intellectual intrigue unfolds already at the level of the content of the canvas. It is not styles or artists that are at stake, but two types of play and two different creative principles. One focuses on a game of cards in which chance is important, as well as the fact that the opponent's cards are unknown (in game theory, this is called "playing with incomplete information"). The other is for chess, where everything is open and calculated, where everyone has exactly the same information as the opponent, where the role of excitement is reduced, and technical skill allows not only to win, but also to feel the peculiar plasticity of this machinery, which is impossible without the other (opponent , co-author and viewer in one person). But the intrigue does not end there. The picture seems to include an additional dimension. In addition to two players (bearded men), closed by means of chess on top of each other, in the foreground we see two women, one of whom is sitting at a table, and the other is reading a book. These two women, left to their own devices, bring us back to chess mechanics, which is not self-contained, but performs an additional function – it frees men from women. In this early painting Duchamp, as if in potency, laid down the "Transition from virgin to newlywed", and "Nude descending the stairs", and "Large glass (Bride, undressed by her bachelors, even)", and many other works up to "Étant donnés", representing are variations on the theme of celibate machines (celibate machines or bachelor machines), in which desire and sexuality cease to be tied to sexual difference.

Machinery and misogyny

What many years later Michel Carrouges called "celibate machines" found in the works of Roussel and Kafka, we find also in their contemporary Duchamp. Moreover, chess is such a basic machine for the latter. This unnatural attraction of the automaton could not find any explanation for itself and was strangely connected with a mystery for which there should not seem to be a place in pure mechanics. Back in 1836, Edgar Poe wrote a half-story, half-essay "The Chess Apparatus of Dr. Mälzel", where he described the well-known automaton "Turk", invented by Kempelen. The story is dedicated to the consistent exposure of the automaton with the help of logical deductions, which later will be famous for the stories of Poe himself, and Chesterton, and Agatha Christie. Interestingly, the revelation begins with the false premise that victory in chess does not require calculation, but chance and inspiration. Such is the XIX century - a combination of science and romanticism. By exposing the automaton, Poe actually invents a genre that, upon closer examination, turns out to be a variant of the automaton and even a semblance of a chess game. We are talking about a classic detective story, in which the secret is available, but only to those who change the mechanics of vision, who see a different type of logic and machinery behind the usual automaticity of events. Such is Dupin in Poe, Father Brown in Chesterton, and Poirot and Miss Marple in Agatha Christie.

The emergence of both the chess machine (pseudo-computer), and the detective genre, and photography, and later cinema, indicates the emergence of a completely new layer of collective spectacles, to which art also tried to adapt. All this is directly related to the emergence of a new type of vision, urban, instantaneous, photographic vision, which has its own mechanics and rhythm. For Viriglio, it is precisely this vision that lies at the origins of the avant-garde: “The European avant-garde actually moved from city to city, from continent to continent, like an army, in the rhythm of progress and militarization, technology and science, and art was now nothing more than a movement of the eye. from one city to another." Duchamp's involvement in this avant-garde movement is obvious, but he turns out to be a kind of analyst of this very machinery. When we encounter Duchamp's work, a key question arises: what is this strange connection between machines and women? Why does the “woman” (or rather, not so much a woman as a virgin and newlywed) become for him the main mechanism that launches the search for a non-artistic space of non-art?

Already from what has been said, it should be clear that this is not at all about what could be called “love”, that Dante love that moved the sun and the luminaries. Here, everything is the other way around: a woman as an object of sexual desire turns out to be the effect of the mechanics of nature itself, the mechanics of life, fixed by us through a machine where the sun and planets are part of a single cosmic mechanism.

Duchamp is only trying to give a vague sense of the materiality of the world beyond the three dimensions of physical reality and beyond the reality of metaphysical

Love for a woman, invented by the troubadours and cultivated by poets from Dante and Petrarch to Goethe, at the end of the 19th century turns out to be something of a kitsch image for the creators of the mass novel. Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola, Flaubert, Maupassant, and even artists exhibiting their work in salons are interested in a completely different aspect of the feminine. All these authors, one way or another, note the important inclusion of women in socio-economic relations - a woman becomes their integral part. Walter Benjamin develops this line most consistently in his work on Baudelaire, where many lines are devoted to the phenomenon of the prostitute in the system of commodity relations. For him, this is not at all the prostitution that has been known since antiquity. It is now directly connected with a mass and technical society. The image of a woman-lover or a woman-mother gives way to the image of a prostitute, who embodies the combination of sexuality and the mechanics of the market. This goes hand in hand with the crisis of the family as a social institution. Family relations are increasingly desexualized, while the prostitute becomes an agent of future relationships, carrying the idea of ​​the technical reproduction of sexuality, which is the beginning of modern pornography and at the same time a new aesthetic attitude towards women, in which the technique of pornography is inscribed in advance (on which, in particular, , the whole fashion system is built).

The reverse side of this process is what can be called the “liberation of a woman”, the acquisition of a new social status by her, which makes it possible to enter into a clash with men, a struggle that in the old days of “romantic love” was unthinkable due to the fact that a woman was in a subordinate position. Having become an element of consumption (a prostitute), a woman, oddly enough, became free. She became addicted to money, but not to men. She entered the mechanics of the market as an element of this machine; the man remained outside of that. This may be one of the reasons why the misogynistic mood seems to be on the rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, resulting in a great deal of research on gender relations.

Perhaps the most significant work can be considered Otto Weininger's "Sex and Character", where the main motive was not so much the humiliation of women and the exaltation of men (which is especially striking today), but an attempt to reveal a person as an indefinite creature in the sense of sex, in which male and feminine beginnings are intertwined and mixed in different proportions, regardless of biological sex. In fact, Weininger proposes to think of sex not in an essentialist way, but as a hidden technical characteristic of a machine (“black box”) that we call a person and which is directly related to his sexuality. The fear of the feminine in itself, which permeates Weininger's book, is at the same time the beginning of the process of opening the "black box", the discovery behind the world of rational machines as tools in relations with the reality of a completely different world of idle, useless and even destructive machines (celibate machines). In this understanding, a “woman” is not opposed to a man, but is a “non-man” - that which deprives him of his essence, as well as the ability to be an author, artist, professional, that is, a representative of society, a laborer.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that Duchamp's works - and the most famous ones, from the "Great Glass" and "L.H.O.O.Q." to "Étant donnés", and less popular ones, such as the painting "Paradise", where we see the squeezed Adam covering his genitals and the uninhibited Eve, or "Dulcinea" with her multiplying women - constantly point to the zone of sexual machinery that comes into conflict with the pragmatics of our world.

The mathematics of mechanicalness and the machinations of sexuality

The sexuality that Duchamp deals with seems to be extremely abstract, far removed from biology and sensual pleasure. Both biology and sensory experience continue to insist on the "use" of sexuality, turning it into a labor of production and reproduction (offspring or pleasure). Such sexuality is already machined by the division of the sexes. Duchamp is looking for its alternative, which would not separate male and female, but would exist in a different dimension (connectedness, community, in a word, in paradise). It is well known that he associates his "Great Glass" with an attempt to construct a fourth dimension in the same way as it is done in geometry.

If in mathematics the rules for manipulating the dimension of space have long been known, then in the field of life practice the fourth dimension is unnecessary, redundant, unrepresentable. Through his experiences with painting, installation, ready-made, Duchamp is only trying to give a vague sense of the materiality of the world beyond the three dimensions of physical reality and beyond metaphysical reality. What he calls the fourth dimension, although referring us to geometry, turns out to be Thus, in geometry, the transition from one dimension of space to another is done according to common law: the beginning of everything is a point; point movement - line, first dimension; line movement - surface, second dimension; surface movement - volume, three-dimensional space; the movement of three-dimensional space - hyperspace, already inaccessible to our senses. And, like an insect moving on the surface and unaware of the third dimension, a person in his three dimensions sometimes receives signs that indicate the presence of an additional dimension. Usually this is called an accident, a violation of order, nonsense.

"The bride, undressed by her bachelors, one in two faces", 1915-1923; L.H.O.O.Q., 1919

Freud called this the unconscious, that is, subjection to the uncontrollable forces of the external, those desires that are not in the world of the senses, cut off from the world of needs and participate in the play of unappropriable libidinal forces. For Freud, as later for Lacan, there is no chance in the world. The designation of something as accidental is only a sign indicating the operation of unconscious forces. What in the mathematical theory of probability is called a chance - an event that may or may not happen with a certain degree of probability, is already built into this or that libidinal stream in psychoanalysis. When we flip a coin and it comes up heads or tails, then, according to probability theory, a random event occurs. In the logic of psychoanalysis, this is an event in the machinery of desire - it actualizes a virtual desire. And this is the desire that we ourselves never know about. This is no longer the mathematics of chance, but the mathematics of mechanicalness. Acting mechanically, we manifest our dependence on the external (the fourth dimension, according to Duchamp), we become elements of a machine in which we are included and whose singularity of action seems to us something impossible. Like deus ex machina.

Duchamp was not interested in the transcendent "purity" of abstractions, referring to the heavenly world, just as he was not interested in the eroticization of art, another way of prostituting representation.

Duchamp is far from identifying the fourth dimension with God. On the contrary, through artistic experience he is trying to find some space of involvement in this fourth dimension, which is outside the sphere of the sensible, but also outside the realm of pure abstraction. He calls this the word "infrafine" (inframince). It is known that he himself refused to define the superfine and said that he could only give concrete examples. Here they are: tobacco smoke, in which the smell of a cigar and the smell of breath are mixed and inseparable; the distance between the surface and the shadow from the object falling on it; an armchair that keeps the warmth of a person who has just left; the difference between two objects of mass production, made from the same matrix with maximum accuracy. The hypersubtle, even in Duchamp's examples, oscillates between the imperfection of our perceptual apparatus and that symbolic zone in which, apparently, no perception is possible any more. Therefore, Alain Badiou tends to see in the superfine only the interval between two identifiable objects, creating a space of continuum, and Thierry de Duve believes that this is not a realm of perception at all, but a place of aesthetic judgment.

The superfine has to do with distinguishing the indistinguishable. This applies not only to sensual pleasure (“The more a thing delights me and attracts my attention, the less superfine it is,” Duchamp says), but also sexuality. Finding a zone of indistinguishability in sexuality means, first of all, overcoming the sexual difference that makes sexuality an attribute of either a woman or a man. And here, of course, examples arise with the Mona Lisa with a mustache and beard (“L.H.O.O.Q.”) or with the famous photo portrait “Rrose Sélavy” (Duchamp in the form of a woman), which was made by Man Ray. However, this is only one side - the mixing of the sexes. Another and, perhaps, the main one is immunity to sexual difference. Not guilt. Innocence as non-art, where "not" initially, and not negatively. This is the “not” that came from the world of language, which considers itself a legislator, to the world before language. For innocence, the fall is the denial of paradise; for life before language and before representation, that is, for non-art, art is that which opposes itself to it and tries to erase the memory of it.

Just as a three-dimensional object casts a two-dimensional shadow, so the fourth dimension casts a shadow in which we exist, calling it three-dimensional space. Mathematical abstraction, on the one hand, and sensory perception, on the other, cease to oppose each other as soon as we find in both of them a zone of the superfine, connecting us with that fourth dimension, which points not to the transcendent world, but to the logic of transition, transformation. , shape changes. In this sense, "not" means only a return to a world that has been rejected or forgotten. This world is comprehended mechanically. But what is mechanical in psychoanalysis (pseudo-accident, speaking error) becomes the machinery of life (penetrating into art as well), introducing the logic of innocence, naivety, infantilism and, associated with this, the avoidance of the entire dominant economy of labor and production. That is why chess is more important for Duchamp than art, and in art the person and his action are more important than the work.

Duchamp's contemporary art has split into two avant-gardes - relatively speaking, intellectual (abstractionism, later conceptualism and minimalism) and sexual (expressionism, surrealism). It would be a mistake to breed them too abruptly. In this case, we only note the trends that Duchamp just bypassed, avoided in his idea of ​​\u200b\u200bready-made "a. He was not interested in the transcendent "purity" of abstractions, referring to the heavenly world, just as he was not interested in the eroticization of art, another way prostitution of representation. Its eroticism is cold and its abstraction sexual. These impossible combinations remain insoluble mysteries for both intellect and perception. They are only needed to counter the machinations of the mind and sexuality, each of which uses the already working machine of art history for its own purposes. How deus ex machina.

"Problem with no solution"

But even in chess itself, Duchamp managed to find a zone of hyperfine. There is a separate area in chess, chess composition, which is not related to the game, but consists in inventing problems with original solutions. Often, positions in such problems look ridiculous, and it is simply impossible to meet them in a practical game. As you know, Nabokov was also fond of composing problems, who drew an analogy of chess studies with poetry. Duchamp also left one similar problem. The position in this problem, in contrast to Nabokov's, is very simple - such a position may well arise in an ordinary game. The problem has been published, but the solution has not been printed. Already after Duchamp's death, in the 1970s, a discussion of this problem began in the Chess Life and Review magazine, in which, by the way, Stanley Kubrick's friend Grandmaster Larry Evans also participated. A solution was never found, but a refutation of the study was also not found. Duchamp appeared as a kind of Fermat from chess. Then we decided to wait for the appearance of powerful computers that can calculate this position. It would seem that this time has already come. Now everyone can put the position of the Duchamp problem on their computer and run a chess program that analyzes it. So did I. The result was unexpected. The program sometimes finds a way to win, then, considering the options deeper, refutes it. At some point, the position value is set to 0.0 (draw), but we cannot be sure at all that after some time this value will not change. It's not quite chess anymore. Before us is life, indistinguishable from an endless computer calculation. Super thin? Or another image of immanence?

Life is a hell of a lot like Russian roulette. Sometimes people go long and hard to glory, but become famous only after death. Someone pulls out one day happy ticket, quickly "shoots" with its talent and just as quickly fades. And someone is gifted from birth, and knows how to turn every step into a real sensation. The artist was so lucky Marcel Duchamp (Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968).

Without a doubt, he was one of the greatest innovators in art, turning it upside down just like his famous urinal. It is to Duchamp that we owe the emergence of Dadaism and. His work has influenced people's perception of minimalism, pop art and conceptual art. Often in his ideas, Marcel Duchamp was ahead of his time and amazed with originality.

In one of beautiful days In 1917, the artist wandered into a plumbing store and bought an ordinary urinal there. Duchamp put it upside down, signed it with the pseudonym R. Mutt and presented it as an exhibit called "Fountain" (Fountain) at the exhibition. Thanks to this scandalous story, Marcel Duchamp gained wild popularity.

“I threw a urinal in their face, and now they admire its aesthetic perfection”, - Duchamp wrote decades later to his German friend, the artist Hans Richter.

The paradox of human consciousness lies in the fact that banal plumbing has become a work of art. The more complex and intricate the philosophy of creativity, the more calmly the public reacts. But the same will be the cause of insomnia in the most inquisitive minds for thousands of years. And although Marcel Duchamp simultaneously came to the conclusion that traditional art is dead and in need of resuscitation, they acted in completely different ways.

The same "Fountain" Duchamp did not represent as the only attempt to "accustom" the viewer to the art of a new level. Prior to this, the public has already met with the "Bicycle Wheel" (Bicycle Wheel) and "Bottle dryer" (Bottle dryer). Nothing new - a simple bicycle wheel and an ordinary bottle dryer. These things already existed, so Marcel Duchamp introduced an absurdly simple new term - ready-made (ready-made), that is, literally - "made ready."

The artist wanted to convey to the viewer that the end came not to art in general, but to the traditional idea of ​​it. The dominant position is given not classical school, but the very concept of the work. Any object could become a real masterpiece, but it should not be very beautiful and evoke predictable associations. Therefore, a snow scraper, a hat rack, and the same urinal were used. The important thing was not to create something ingenious, but to clearly explain why Duchamp's inverted urinal suddenly became a unique masterpiece.

Creativity in the usual sense of the word Marcel Duchamp was generally of little interest. The future artist studied at the Lyceum in Rouen, did not excel there, but clearly excelled at playing chess. In addition, in adulthood, Duchamp was fond of physics and mathematics, which helped him, along with his brothers, to organize the "Golden Ratio Salon", where they explored ideal proportions and mathematical foundations art.

This fascinated him much more than drawing, so Marcel Duchamp painted pictures only at the beginning of his life. creative way. One of the most famous works the artist was Nude Descending a Staircase. The name makes us imagine a certain girl, but it is simply impossible to see her in the chaos of degrees.

However, looking at her, we have no doubt that we have a staircase in front of us, along which a girl descends. Maybe we are again becoming unwitting victims of the artist's sophisticated humor? The author himself explained the concept of the picture as "organization of kinetic elements, transmission of time and space through the abstract representation of movement". Affordable, isn't it?

The name of another painting by Marcel Duchamp - "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even" - also makes the fantasy play with a riot of colors. And how, Monsieur Marcel Duchamp, would you like me to understand you?

In the picture, we again will not see any specifics. Suppose that the unfortunate girl herself is in the upper part, and the bachelors who have something to do with her are in the lower part. However, the bride is more like a queen bee with three windows in her body. And it’s scary to talk about the content of the second part of the picture: a group of people is standing not far from the mysterious mechanism, next to it is a semblance of the sun ... Surely Duchamp laughed a lot, reading the criticism of his works. He later explained to the world that "bride strips naked for pleasure that will humiliate her".

In the future, the malicious genius Marcel Duchamp in every possible way denied the role of the artist, every year reducing the number of his own paintings. With much more zeal, he ridiculed the works of other authors.

Inherited from Duchamp and the unsurpassed "La Gioconda". Marcel found a postcard on which it was depicted, added a mustache and beard to the girl and gave this work an inexplicable abbreviation name - L.H.O.O.Q. Blasphemy? No, a new masterpiece!

The versatile and unpredictable character of Marcel Duchamp helped him to show himself in painting, literature, the film industry and the exact sciences. However, despite the obvious talent and limitless potential, Duchamp decided to leave creativity. Who knows what other shocking works, notes, films and ideas the viewer would see if it were not for the creator's passion for chess.

In 2000, the Duchamp Prize for Young Artists was established. For 15 years in France, it has become the largest in the field of contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp made an invaluable contribution to the understanding of creativity and went down in history thanks to his inquisitive mind and bold decisions.

The urinal was clean and new, fresh from the store. Duchamp only turned him 90 degrees, called him "Fountain" and wrote on his side one of his pseudonyms - R. Mutt, which means "fool".

Almost 100 years have passed. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph newspaper conducted a survey among British art market insiders. As a result, 500 of the most influential artists, dealers, critics, museum curators and gallery owners formed the TOP-5 works of the 20th century that had the greatest impact on the further development of world art. This resulted in a list:

1. Marcel Duchamp. "The fountain"
2. Pablo Picasso. "Avignon Girls"
3. Andy Warhol. Diptych "Marilyn"
4. Pablo Picasso. "Guernica"
5. Henri Matisse. "Red Room"

The expert, who was asked to comment on the fact that the urinal won first place, admitted that he was slightly shocked - not because the "Fountain" is not worthy of such an honor, but because he was ahead of Picasso and Matisse.

And that's true. After all, these artists, although they scoffed as best they could at the usual ideas about painting, nevertheless honestly worked with their hands, drawing something there on canvas. And then a man went to the store, bought a typical thing there and - here you are - a brilliant work. Duchamp came up with a name for such art - ready-made (from the English ready-made), i.e. ready product.

What is the point

Since the Renaissance art chasing reality, trying to repeat it as accurately as possible. For example, in painting, the end product of these efforts was a framed canvas, which was something like a window into the world - as if it were not a canvas at all, but transparent glass. That is, for several centuries, realism was the usual norm. And the best product was considered the one where reality was depicted most realistically - that, roughly speaking, was the criterion of quality.

And suddenly, at the end of the 19th century, the criteria changed. Why? This is a separate big story. But the fact remains. From post-impressionism, symbolism, etc., artists began to depict not the reality behind the “glass”, but what was happening in their head, heart, subconscious, etc. That is, not the world, but rather their impressions of it.

Both words in the phrase "depict reality" were questioned. When the Cubists glued ropes, newspapers and playing cards to the canvas, they violated the principle of DRAWING. As in this painting by Picasso "Guitar":

And when the same Duchamp drew the devil knows what and called it “Nude descending the stairs”, the principle of depicting REALITY was violated.

Events escalated. Art, as it were, woke up, became aware of itself and began to ask itself questions: “What am I? Why am I? What are my limits? But if I do this, will it still be art, or will it not?”

Search engine launched full force. Gradually, a work of art was reformatted from a servant or even a slave of reality into an independent free object. And, as it turned out, an object with a huge number of degrees of freedom. The rapid capture of new territories by art began.

Reflection also touched on such an immutable truth: an object of art is something that is made by the hands of an artist, and not bought ready-made in a store. By placing the urinal, Duchamp thus performed a zero creative act. There is basically no "doneness" here. Art in the person of Duchamp, as it were, asks itself the question: “And if I don’t change matter at all, I take a ready-made form - will this be art?”

This artifact is considered ingenious precisely for its crystalline purity of the question. If the “Bicycle Wheel”, exhibited in 1913, Duchamp mounted to a stool:

And the “Bottle Dryer”, exhibited in 1913, was assembled from improvised materials:

That urinal remained conceptually almost untouched. The author only signed it, turned it over and renamed it.

So what then is the merit of Duchamp? In that he questioned previously obvious things. 1. That the work must be MADE BY THE HANDS OF THE ARTIST. 2. That the end product of creativity is, in fact, the same MATERIAL OBJECT that the artist made. Together with the urinal, Duchamp actually put forward the idea that an artistic act is not an oil painting, but those complex processes in the head and soul of the artist that precede it. The refutation of the old and the obvious, and thereby the expansion of the boundaries of art - that is the genius of Duchamp's Dadaist.

The habitual mimetic (imitative) function of art chasing reality was done away with once and for all. Duchamp brought to its logical end, to complete absurdity, what constituted the highest value of the former art. And the truth is - no pictorial copy can show the subject better and, if it comes to that, more realistic than he does it himself.

A powerful bomb was planted under the border posts between art and non-art. Duchamp showed that art is essentially a context. That aesthetic laws are relative and determined by the rules of the game external to the art object, which are set almost arbitrarily by the artist himself, art critics, gallery owners, etc.

As for Duchamp's expansion of the boundaries of the possible, it is colossal. Readymade later spread and became an integral part of almost all genres of visual art - assemblage, installation, performance, environment, etc.

Details

Strictly speaking, Duchamp did not show the urinal because he was not allowed to do so. Although he paid $6 to participate in the exhibition, at the last moment its organizers got scared and gave Duchamp a turn. And the urinal was forever lost to mankind - either lost in the storerooms of this gallery, or Duchamp himself threw it in the trash.

In the next three decades, world art was somewhat distracted by surrealism, neofigurativism and abstract expressionism. And only in the 50s, when pop art revived the readymade, "Fountain" gained worldwide fame.

By order of museums, Duchamp made several author's repetitions of his urinal. A few more signed copies have been sold to private collectors. Until last year, it was believed that there were 15 such author's replicas in the world. But recently it turned out that 4 more urinals claim to be the authenticity of Duchamp's signature.

The second life of "Fountain"

Duchamp's work continues to torment artists who, no, no, and even burst out with some kind of reference to him. For example, in Russia, two such remarks were made in the direction of "Fountain". In 1993, Avdey Ter-Oganyan exhibited his work "Problems of Restoring Works of Contemporary Art" at the Trekhprudny Gallery.

“I imagined a situation in which Duchamp's Fountain crashed,” the artist comments. - “What will the museum workers do? Glue the old one or buy a new one. I think they will do the most ridiculous thing - make a copy. But the point is not in a specific subject, but in an idea. Duchamp even left instructions that museums should always exhibit the usual new model for three kopecks - in order to avoid the transformation of the "fountain" into nostalgic antiques.

A year before, in the same "Gallery on Trekhprudny", Ter-Oganyan exhibited a urinal, returning it to its original functions.

Surprisingly, not long after, performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli urinated on a Duchamp piece on display in Nimes, southern France. He told the court that in this way he returned the truly Dadaist spirit to Duchamp's work. The artist was sentenced to a month in prison for "deliberately defacing a public object", which actually sounds very ambiguous.

On January 6, 2006, the French police detained Pinoncelli for the second time, already at the Pompidou Museum of Modern Art, where Pinoncelli wrote “Dada” on the “Fountain” and, trying to break it with a hammer, broke off a piece. In his defense, Pinoncelli said: “I am not some cheap vandal that people try to make me out to be. Vandal does not sign his work. I winked at Dadaism, I wanted to evoke its spirit, the spirit of disrespect.” However, despite the credibility of the explanations, the court still gave 77-year-old Pierre Pinoncelli three months probation and fined him.

Under the hammer

In 2002, the last set of Duchamp's ready-mades, which remained in private hands, was sold at Phillips auction in New York - 14 objects from the famous Arturo Schwartz collection. The works were created in the period from 1913 to 1920, and in 1964 the artist executed their author's copies. "Fountain" was sold for 1,185 thousand dollars.

DUCHAMP (Duchamp) Marseille (Henri Robert Marcel) (28.7.1887, Blainville-Crévon, Seine-Maritime Department - 2.10.1968, Neuilly-sur-Seine), french artist. He began painting in 1902 (Blainville Chapel, Museum of Art, Philadelphia). In 1904 he arrived in Paris, where he studied at the R. Julian Academy. In his early works, he mastered the techniques of post-impressionism, fauvism and painting of the Nabis group (Red House in the Apple Orchard, 1908, private collection, New York, etc.). In 1911, together with his brothers R. Duchamp Villon and the painter Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp; 1875-1963), he formed the Puteaux group, which formed the core of Montparnasse cubism, which declared itself in 1912 at the Golden Section exhibition. Through the crushing of forms, the overlapping of small faces and planes, Duchamp sought to convey movement, which brings his painting of the early 1910s closer to the search for futurism. The doubling, overlapping volumes capture, as in chronophotography, the different phases of the movement of the figure (“A sad young man on a train”, 1911-12, P. Guggenheim Collection, Venice; “Nude descending stairs No. 2”, 1912, Museum Arts, Philadelphia).

Since 1913, Duchamp, disillusioned with painting, showed his first “ready-made objects” at exhibitions - ready-made: “Bicycle wheel on a stool” (1913), “Bottle dryer” (1914, Museum of Modern Art, New York), the infamous "Fountain" (a urinal was exhibited under that name in 1917), "L. N. O. O. Q "(" Mona Lisa with a mustache, circa 1919, National Museum contemporary art, Paris; see illustration for the article Dadaism), etc. They marked the beginning of the Dadaist period in the artist's work. In 1915 he arrived in New York, where, together with F. Picabia and Man Ray, he founded a group whose activities prepared the artistic movement of Dadaism. Turning (since 1913) to painting on glass, he created a large-format composition "Large Glass: The Newlywed, Undressed by Her Bachelors" (1915-1923, not preserved; author's reconstructions - 1936, Museum of Art. Philadelphia, and 1961, Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm ), symbolizing the circulation of instinctive desires and flows of the subconscious.

In 1923, Duchamp announced his rejection of artistic creation, but from time to time he made provocative manifestations of "anti-art". In 1935-41 he created a kind of portable museum: miniature replicas and reproductions of his own works, laid out in boxes packed in a suitcase (National Museum of Modern Art, Paris). After Duchamp's death, another of his creations was discovered - "Data: 1) a waterfall, 2) a gas lamp" (1946-66, Museum of Art, Philadelphia). This installation with defiantly erotic female figure, prostrate with a lamp in her hand against the backdrop of a strange landscape, can only be seen through the crack of a dilapidated door that tightly overlaps the mysterious scene.

At the end of his life, Duchamp gained fame as a pioneer and became the idol of a new generation of avant-garde, who resumed the experimental search for Dadaism. His work has entered the prehistory of such trends as on-art, non-art, kinetic art, minimalism, conceptual art. Duchamp's sister is the painter Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963), the wife of the painter Jean Crotti (Crotti; 1878-1958).

Cit.: Dialogues with M. Duchamp. L., 1971; The essential writings. L., 1975; Die Schriften / Hrsg. von S. Stauffer. Z., 1981.

Lit.: Tomkins C. The world of M. Duchamp. N.Y., 1966; Schwarz A. M. Duchamp. R., 1974; Cabanne R. Les trois Duchamp: J. Villon, R. Duchamp-Villon, M. Duchamp. Neuchatel, 1975; Molderings N. M. Duchamp. Fr./M., 1983; Bailly J. C. M. Duchamp. R., 1984; Lebel R. M. Duchamp. R., 1985; Moure G. M. Duchamp. L., 1988; M. Duchamp. (Cat.). Camb., 1993; M. Duchamp: artist of the century / Ed. R. E. Kuenzli, F. M. Naumann. Z., 1994; Mink J. M. Duchamp: art as anti-art. Koln, 1995.

USA

Childhood

The family had seven children, one of whom died shortly after birth. Of the children, four became famous artists: Marcel, Jacques Villon (Gaston Duchamp, 1875-1963) and Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1916) (older brothers), as well as his sister Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti (1889-1963).

Love and interest in art in the family were due to maternal grandfather - Emile Nicolas, a former artist and engraver. The whole house was filled with his work. The father of the family gave the children freedom in the matter of choosing a profession, without insisting on continuing their business. Duchamp, like his older brothers, studied at the Lyceum in Rouen from the age of 10 to 17. He was not an outstanding student, but he did well in math, winning school math competitions several times. In 1903 he also won an art competition.

At the age of 14, he began to take a serious interest in drawing. From this time, his portraits of his sister Susanna have been preserved. First paintings Duchamp (landscapes of the surroundings in the spirit of impressionism, drawings) refer to. In he came to Paris, settled in Montmartre, tried to study at the Académie Julian, dropped out. Duchamp's painting during this period was not independent, close either to Cezanne or to the fauvism of Matisse. His works end up at the Autumn Salon, and Guillaume Apollinaire responds to them in his review.

Chess

Duchamp was a good chess player. He completed the title of master at the Third French Chess Championship in 1923, scoring 4 points out of 8. He played for the French team at the international chess Olympiads of 1928-1933, playing in the hypermodern style, resorting, for example, to the Nimzowitsch defense in the opening. The French team of those years usually took places in the middle of the final table.

In the early 1930s he reached his peak as a player. Participated in chess by correspondence, was a chess journalist - led a column in a magazine. Author of a number of chess problems.

Cubism

Through his brothers Jacques Villon and Rémond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp was introduced to Cubism. He joined the De Puteaux group, which included such artists as Gleuz, Metzinger.

Creativity and recognition

Then, in the -s, Duchamp turned to a radical avant-garde search (“Nude descending the stairs”,; “The bride, undressed by her bachelors, one in two persons”, -), which brought him closer to Dadaism and surrealism. At the same time, he defiantly eschewed the role of an artist, a professional, and even painting in the traditional sense of the word was becoming less and less common, practicing the shocking public method of “ready-made things” (ready-made), which makes an artistic object only the will and signature of the author, the context of the exhibition or museum (“Bicycle wheel”,; “Bottle dryer”,; “Fountain”,). Such an object can also be the works of old masters parodied as examples of "high art" - for example, "La Gioconda" by Leonardo da Vinci ("L.H.O.O.Q.", ), Duchamp's production of these years, which is extremely few and always has a provocative-playful character up to the invention of imaginary authors (the most famous of these alter egos is the so-called Rosa Selyavi), was constantly accompanied by absurdly detailed analytical notes by the author. In the 20s, Marcel Duchamp actively participated in the collective actions of the Dada group and the surrealists, published in magazines and almanacs of the Dadaists and participated in the filming of several films. The most famous of them was the film by René Clair "Intermission" (1924) to the music of his friend, avant-garde composer Erik Satie, which became a classic of the genre and is still popular today. Subsequently, Duchamp practically withdrew from creativity, indulging in near-scientific research and his favorite game of chess, but for several decades remained the most influential figure in the American art scene and the international avant-garde, the object of the most controversial art criticism interpretations. After living mostly in the USA, he took American citizenship.

Duchamp shot together with Man Ray the experimental film Anemic Cinema ( , for details see: ), a short feature film by Paolo Marina Blanco is dedicated to him ( , see: ). In France, the Marcel Duchamp Prize for Young Artists was established.

• Photographed in the image for a bottle of toilet water " Belle Haleine"(rus. "Elena the beautiful " ).

Publications

Duchamp's writings

• The Writings/Ed. by Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1973.
• Duchamp du Signe/Ed. par Michel Sanouillet, Elmer Peterson. Paris: Flammarion, 1994
• Affectionately, Marcel: The Selected Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp/ Ed. by Francis M. Naumann, Hector Obalk, Jill Taylor. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
• Thoughts on the contrary / Andre Breton. Anthology of black humor. - M.: Carte Blanche, 1999. - S. 373-376.

Literature about the artist

• Romanov I."All chess players are artists." // "64 - Chess Review". - 1987. - No. 17. - S. 22-23.
• Octavio Paz. The castle of purity // Art magazine. - 1998. - No. 21. - S. 15-19 (chapter from the book of the same name about M.D.).
• // Space in other words: French poets of the XX century about the image in art. - St. Petersburg: Ivan Limbakh Publishing House, 2005. - S. 124-132.
• Duve T. de. Picturesque nominalism. Marcel Duchamp, painting and modernity / Per. from fr. A. Shestakova. M.: Publishing House of the Gaidar Institute, 2012
• Tomkins K. Marcel Duchamp. Afternoon conversations. M.: Grundrisse, 2014-160 p.
• Tomkins C. The World of Marcel Duchamp. New York: Time, 1966.
• Schwartz A. The complete works of Marcel Duchamp. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1969.
• Cabanne P. Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp. New York: Viking Press, 1971.
• Marcel Duchamp / Ed. by Anne D'Harnoncourt, Kynaston McShine. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973.
• Suquet J. Miroir de la Mariee. Paris: Flammarion, 1974.
• Goldfarb Marquis A. Marcel Duchamp= Eros, c'est la vie, a Biography. Troy: Whitston, 1981.
• Bonk E. Marcel Duchamp, The Box in a Valise. New York: Rizzoli, 1989.
• Cage J. Mirage verbal: Writings through Marcel Duchamp, Notes. Dijon, Ulysse fin de siècle, 1990.
• Duve Th. de. The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Halifax: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
• Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life/Ed. by Pontus Hulten a.o. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.
• Buskirk M., Nixon M. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
• Joselit D. Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998.
• Difference/indifference: musings on postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage/ Ed. by Moira Roth M., Jonathan Katz. Amsterdam: GB Arts International, 1998.
• Hopkins D. Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst: The Bride Shared. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.
• Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp…Resonance/ Ed by Susan Davidson a.o. Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz; New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998.
• Kachur L. Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Surrealist Exhibition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.
• Masheck J. Marcel Duchamp in Perspective. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2002.
• Graham L. Duchamp & Androgyny: Art, Gender, and Metaphysics. Berkeley: No-Thing Press, 2003.
• Moffitt J.F. Alchemist of the Avant-Garde: The Case of Marcel Duchamp. New York: State University of New York Press, 2003.
• Cros C. Marcel Duchamp. London: Reaction Books, 2006.

Marcel Duchamp in modern culture

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Excerpt characterizing Duchamp, Marseille

- No, dear count, you let me take care of your daughters. At least I won't be here for long. And you too. I will try to amuse yours. I heard a lot about you in St. Petersburg, and I wanted to get to know you, ”she said to Natasha with her uniformly beautiful smile. - I heard about you from my page - Drubetskoy. Did you hear he's getting married? And from a friend of my husband - Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, - she said with special emphasis, hinting that she knew his relationship with Natasha. - She asked, in order to get to know each other better, to allow one of the young ladies to sit the rest of the performance in her box, and Natasha went over to her.
In the third act, a palace was presented on the stage, in which many candles burned and paintings depicting knights with beards were hung. In the middle were probably the king and queen. The king waved right hand, and, apparently shy, sang something badly, and sat on the crimson throne. The girl, who was first in white, then in blue, was now dressed in one shirt with loose hair and stood near the throne. She sang about something sadly, turning to the queen; but the king waved his hand sternly, and men with bare legs and women with bare legs came out from the sides, and they all began to dance together. Then the violins began to play very thinly and cheerfully, one of the girls with bare thick legs and thin arms, separating from the others, went backstage, straightened her corsage, went to the middle and began to jump and soon beat one foot against the other. Everyone in the stalls clapped their hands and shouted bravo. Then one man stood in a corner. In the orchestra, cymbals and trumpets began to play louder, and this one man with bare legs began to jump very high and mince his legs. (This man was Duport, who received 60 thousand a year for this art.) Everyone in the stalls, in the boxes and the raike began to clap and shout with all their might, and the man stopped and began to smile and bow in all directions. Then others danced, with bare legs, men and women, then again one of the kings shouted something to the music, and everyone began to sing. But suddenly a storm broke out, chromatic scales and chords of a diminished seventh were heard in the orchestra, and everyone ran and dragged again one of those present backstage, and the curtain fell. Again a terrible noise and crackling arose between the spectators, and everyone, with enthusiastic faces, began to shout: Duport! Duport! Duport! Natasha no longer found this strange. She looked around with pleasure, smiling happily.
- N "est ce pas qu" il est admirable - Duport? [Isn't it true that Duport is delightful?] - said Helen, turning to her.
- Oh, oui, [Oh, yes,] - Natasha answered.

During the intermission, there was a smell of cold in Helen's box, the door opened and, bending down and trying not to catch anyone, Anatole entered.
“Let me introduce my brother to you,” Helen said, uneasily shifting her eyes from Natasha to Anatole. Natasha turned her pretty head over her bare shoulder to the handsome man and smiled. Anatole, who was as good up close as he was from a distance, sat down next to her and said that he had long wanted to have this pleasure, ever since the Naryshkin ball, at which he had had the pleasure, which he had not forgotten, to see her. Kuragin with women was much smarter and simpler than in male society. He spoke boldly and simply, and Natasha was strangely and pleasantly struck by the fact that not only was there nothing so terrible in this man, about whom so much was said, but that, on the contrary, he had the most naive, cheerful and good-natured smile.
Kuragin asked about the impression of the performance and told her about how Semyonova, playing in the last performance, fell.
“Do you know, Countess,” he said, suddenly addressing her as if he were an old acquaintance, “we are having a carousel in costumes; you should participate in it: it will be very fun. Everyone gathers at the Karagins. Please come, right, eh? he said.
Saying this, he did not take his smiling eyes off his face, from his neck, from Natasha's bare hands. Natasha undoubtedly knew that he admired her. It was pleasant for her, but for some reason it became cramped and hard for her from his presence. When she did not look at him, she felt that he was looking at her shoulders, and she involuntarily intercepted his gaze so that he would better look into her eyes. But, looking into his eyes, she felt with fear that between him and her there was not at all that barrier of shame that she always felt between herself and other men. She herself, not knowing how, after five minutes felt terribly close to this man. When she turned away, she was afraid that he would take her from behind. bare hand would not kiss her on the neck. They talked about the simplest things and she felt that they were close, like she had never been with a man. Natasha looked back at Helen and at her father, as if asking them what it meant; but Helen was occupied with a conversation with some general and did not return her glance, and her father's glance did not tell her anything, only that he always said: "fun, well, I'm glad."
In one of the minutes of awkward silence, during which Anatole calmly and stubbornly looked at her with his bulging eyes, Natasha, in order to break this silence, asked him how he liked Moscow. Natasha asked and blushed. It constantly seemed to her that she was doing something indecent when talking to him. Anatole smiled, as if encouraging her.
– At first I didn’t like it much, because what makes a city pleasant is ce sont les jolies femmes, [pretty women,] isn’t it? Well, now I like it very much,” he said, looking at her significantly. “Are you going to the carousel, Countess?” Go," he said, and reaching out to her bouquet, lowering his voice, he said, "Vous serez la plus jolie." Venez, chere comtesse, et comme gage donnez moi cette fleur. [You will be the prettiest. Go, dear countess, and give me this flower as a pledge.]
Natasha did not understand what he said, just like he himself, but she felt that in incomprehensible words it was indecent intent. She didn't know what to say and turned away as if she hadn't heard what he said. But as soon as she turned away, she thought that he was behind her so close to her.
“What is he now? Is he confused? Angry? Need to fix this?" she asked herself. She couldn't help but look back. She looked him straight in the eyes, and his intimacy and confidence, and the good-natured tenderness of his smile won her over. She smiled exactly as he did, looking straight into his eyes. And again she felt with horror that there was no barrier between him and her.
The curtain went up again. Anatole left the box, calm and cheerful. Natasha returned to her father in the box, already completely subordinate to the world in which she was. Everything that happened before her already seemed quite natural to her; but for that all her former thoughts about the groom, about Princess Marya, about village life never once crossed her mind, as if it had all been long, long gone.
In the fourth act there was some kind of devil who sang, waving his hand until the boards were pulled out under him, and he sank down there. Natasha only saw this from the fourth act: something worried and tormented her, and the cause of this excitement was Kuragin, whom she involuntarily followed with her eyes. As they left the theatre, Anatole approached them, called their carriage, and helped them up. As he lifted Natasha up, he shook her hand above the elbow. Natasha, excited and red, looked back at him. He, shining with his eyes and gently smiling, looked at her.

Only when she arrived home, Natasha could clearly think about everything that had happened to her, and suddenly remembering Prince Andrei, she was horrified, and in front of everyone for tea, for which everyone sat down after the theater, she gasped loudly and flushed ran out of the room. - "My God! I died! she said to herself. How could I let this happen?" she thought. For a long time she sat covering her flushed face with her hands, trying to give herself a clear account of what had happened to her, and could neither understand what had happened to her, nor what she felt. Everything seemed to her dark, indistinct and frightening. There, in this huge, illuminated hall, where Duport jumped on wet boards to the music with bare legs in a jacket with sequins, both girls and old men, and Helen, naked with a calm and proud smile, shouted bravo in delight - there, under the shadow of this Helen , there it was all clear and simple; but now alone, with herself, it was incomprehensible. - "What it is? What is this fear that I felt for him? What is this pangs of conscience that I feel now? she thought.
To one old countess, Natasha would be able to tell everything that she thought in bed at night. Sonya, she knew, with her stern and solid look, either would not have understood anything, or would have been horrified by her confession. Natasha, alone with herself, tried to resolve what tormented her.
“Did I die for the love of Prince Andrei or not? she asked herself, and answered herself with a reassuring smile: What kind of fool am I that I ask this? What happened to me? Nothing. I didn't do anything, I didn't cause it. No one will know, and I will never see him again, she told herself. It became clear that nothing had happened, that there was nothing to repent of, that Prince Andrei could love me like this. But what kind? Oh my God, my God! why isn't he here?" Natasha calmed down for a moment, but then again some instinct told her that although all this was true and although there was nothing, instinct told her that all her former purity of love for Prince Andrei had died. And she again in her imagination repeated her entire conversation with Kuragin and imagined the face, gestures and gentle smile of this handsome and courageous man, while he shook her hand.