Stylistic features of the collection of Odessa stories. "Odessa stories"

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Time and space in I. Babel's story "How it was done in Odessa".

Artistic space and time in Babel's story are really marked - this is pre-revolutionary Odessa. But they are also categories of a special fantasy world, full of bright things and bright events, in which amazing people live. The story intertwines the present and the past. In the "present" tense at the Jewish cemetery, a conversation takes place between the narrator and Arye-Leib, who retrospectively tells about "how it was done in Odessa." The reader will learn that the exaltation and "terrible end" of the King has already happened and most of the heroes of Moldavanka are dead. The time of action is the past, and the narrator, being in the present tense, listens to stories about past legendary events from the life of dead heroes.

The Odessa world in this story is presented in the light of a romantic transformation of rough reality. Heroes - bandits, raiders, thieves. But they are the knights of Moldavanka. Their King is the Odessa Robin Hood. The system of their life values is clear and simple - family, welfare, procreation. And the greatest value is human life. When a drunken Savka Butsis accidentally kills Iosif Muginshtein during a raid, Benya sincerely cries “for the dear dead, as for his own brother” and arranges a magnificent funeral for him, and for his mother, Aunt Pesya, knocks out good maintenance from the rich Tartakovsky and shames him for his greed . And Savka Bucis rested in the same cemetery, next to the grave of Joseph, who he killed. And they served such a memorial service for him, which the inhabitants of Odessa never dreamed of. So Benya Krik restored justice. No one has the right to shoot a living person. The heroes of the story are bandits, but not murderers. In their actions, a kind of protest against the rich Tartakovsky, gentlemen bailiffs, fat grocers and their arrogant wives. The author raises his characters above the everyday life and grayness of bourgeois life, challenging the dull and stuffy world of everyday life. Babel's Odessa Tales reflects the ideal image of the world. This world is like one family, a single organism, in the words of Aryeh-Leib, "as if one mother gave birth to us." That is why the lisping Moiseyka calls the bandit Benyu Krik the king. Neither Froim Grach, nor Kolka Pakovsky, nor Khaim Drong climbed "to the top of the rope ladder, but ... hung down below, on shaky steps", although they had both strength, and rigidity, and rage to rule. And only Benya Krik was called the King. Because his actions were guided by a sense of justice, a humane attitude towards a person, because his world is a family where everyone helps each other, experiences joy and sorrow together. All of Odessa went to the cemetery behind the coffin of Joseph Muginshtein: policemen in cotton gloves, attorneys at law, doctors of medicine, midwives, paramedics, chicken traders from the Old Bazaar, and honorary milkmaids from Bugaevka. The whole world buried poor Joseph, who had not seen anything in his life, "except for a couple of trifles." And "neither the cantor, nor the choir, nor the funeral brotherhood asked for money for the funeral." And people, "quietly moving away from Savka's grave, rushed to run, as if from a fire." Tartakovsky on the same day decided to close the case, because he is also part of the world, in which there is no place for a person with the soul of a murderer, in the words of Arie Leib. This is how Odessa appears in the story.

But the history of the Odessa world has sunk into the past. No more King. The old world with its system of social, family and moral values has been destroyed. "Odessa Stories" is called "retrospective utopia" by genre. Babel shows the collapse of the world of the utopia he created, where the rough base reality is transformed into a “created legend” of a celebration of a triumphant life, a bright, noisy flesh full of Rabelaisian joys, where all real difficulties are overcome by laughter, which allows you to look at bad reality through the prism of romantic irony. No wonder one of the leading musical leitmotifs is the aria of the protagonist of Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci, a comic artist experiencing the tragedy of love.

Thus, Babel's "Odessa Tales" presents:

the real world: Odessa in the first years of Soviet power, where the narrator and his interlocutors are;
non-existent world: the idealized world of pre-revolutionary Odessa, left in the past, with its moral values and legendary heroes, for whom the highest value is life itself with its carnal joys, strong ties between people living as a single family.

History in Babel's story appears in the guise of the past, present and future. The past is shown in the guise of an idealized bygone Odessa, presented in the form of a full-blooded life of its inhabitants, the present is shown in the symbolic image of the “great cemetery”, where most of the Rabelaisian heroes of Odessa-mother are buried. The author's assessment of the category "future" is expressed the least verbally. However, for Babel, judging by the intonation with which he describes his heroes (his bandits evoke sympathy and sympathy), the longed-for communist “future”, built on the death of people and the total destruction of the old, is a dystopia. I believe that this idea is suggested by the final lines of the story. “You know everything. But what's the use if you still have glasses on your nose, and autumn in your soul? .. ”These words sound, after all, at the beginning of the story. The blind will not see that something important is leaving people's lives, that the old is crumbling to the ground, that there is no foundation on which to build a bright future, especially with autumn in the soul. In my opinion, this is how these words of the old Arye-Leib can be interpreted. Babel does not openly speak about these fears, but his silence is much more eloquent.

The aristocrats of Moldavanka, they were pulled into crimson vests, their shoulders were covered by red jackets, and on their fleshy legs the skin of the color of heavenly azure burst. Straightening up to their full height and sticking out their bellies, the bandits clapped to the beat of the music, shouted "bitterly" and threw flowers to the bride, and she, forty-year-old Dvoira, sister of Beni Krik, sister of the King, disfigured by illness, with an overgrown goiter and eyes popping out of their sockets, sat on a mountain of pillows next to a frail boy, bought with Eichbaum's money and numb with longing.

The ceremony of donation was coming to an end, the shames were hoarse and the double bass did not get along with the violin. Over the courtyard suddenly stretched a slight smell of burning.

“Benya,” said papa Krik, an old binduzh worker who was known as a rude man among the binduzhniks, “Benya, do you know that mine gives up?” It seems to Mina that we have soot on fire ...

“Daddy,” the King replied to his drunken father, “please drink and eat, don’t worry about these stupid things ...

And papa Creek followed his son's advice. He ate and drank. But the cloud of smoke became more and more poisonous. Somewhere the edges of the sky have already turned pink. And already he shot into the sky a narrow, like a sword, tongue of flame. The guests got up and began sniffing the air, and the women squealed at them. The raiders then exchanged glances with each other. And only Benya, who did not notice anything, was inconsolable.

“The holiday is being violated for Mina,” he shouted, full of despair, “darlings, I ask you to eat and drink ...

But at this time the same young man who came at the beginning of the evening appeared in the yard.

“King,” he said, “I have a few words to say to you…

- Well, speak, - the King answered, - you always have a couple of words in reserve ...

“King,” the unknown young man said and giggled, “this is downright ridiculous, the site is burning like a candle ...

The shopkeepers were dumbfounded. The raiders chuckled. Sixty-year-old Manka, the ancestor of the suburban bandits, putting two fingers into her mouth, whistled so piercingly that her neighbors swayed.

“Manya, you are not at work,” Benya remarked to her, “cold-blooded, Manya ...

The young man who brought this startling news was still laughing.

“They left the site for about forty people,” he said, moving his jaws, “and went to the round-up; so they walked back about fifteen paces, as it was already on fire ... Run to look if you want ...

But Benya forbade the guests to go look at the fire. He went with two companions. The plot regularly burned from four sides. The policemen, shaking their behinds, ran up the smoky stairs and threw chests out of the windows. Under the guise, the arrested fled. The firemen were zealous, but there was no water in the nearest faucet. The bailiff—that same broom that sweeps clean—was standing on the opposite sidewalk, biting the mustache that was in his mouth. The new broom stood motionless. Benya, passing by the bailiff, saluted him in a military manner.

“Good health, your honor,” he said sympathetically. What do you say to this misfortune? It's a nightmare...

He stared at the burning building, shook his head and smacked his lips.

- Ah ah ah…

And when Benya returned home, the lanterns in the yard had already gone out and dawn was breaking in the sky. The guests dispersed, and the musicians dozed off with their heads resting on the handles of their double basses. Only Dvoira was not going to sleep. With both hands she pushed her timid husband to the door of their bridal chamber and looked at him carnivorously, like a cat that, holding a mouse in its mouth, gently tastes it with its teeth.

HOW IT WAS DONE IN ODESSA

“Reb Arye-Leib,” I said to the old man, “let's talk about Ben Krik. Let's talk about its lightning-fast beginning and terrible end. Three shadows clutter the paths of my imagination. Here is Froim Grach. The steel of his deeds—wouldn't it bear comparison with the strength of the King? Here is Kolka Pakovsky. The rage of this man contained everything that is needed in order to dominate. And did Chaim Drong fail to discern the brilliance of the new star? But why did one Benya Krik ascend to the top of the rope ladder, while all the others hung down, on shaky steps?

Reb Arye-Leib was silent, sitting on the cemetery wall. Before us lay the green tranquility of the graves. A person who wants an answer must be patient. A person who has knowledge deserves importance. Therefore, Arye-Leib was silent, sitting on the cemetery wall. Finally he said:

- Why he? Why not, you want to know? So - forget for a while that you have glasses on your nose, and autumn is in your soul. Stop arguing at your desk and stuttering in public. Imagine for a moment that you are brawling in the squares and stuttering on paper. You are a tiger, you are a lion, you are a cat. You can spend the night with a Russian woman, and the Russian woman will be satisfied with you. You are twenty five years old. If rings were attached to heaven and earth, you would grab those rings and pull heaven to earth. And your dad is a binduzhnik Mendel Krik. What is this dad thinking? He thinks about drinking a good glass of vodka, punching someone in the face, about his horses, and nothing else. You want to live, and he makes you die twenty times a day. What would you do if you were Beni Krik? You wouldn't do anything. And he did. Therefore, he is the King, and you keep a fig in your pocket.

He - Benchik - went to Froim Grach, who then already looked at the world with only one eye and was what he is. He told Froim:

- Take me. I want to wash up on your shore. Whichever shore I hit will win.

The rook asked him:

Who are you, where do you come from and what do you breathe?

“Try me, Froim,” Benya answered, “and we’ll stop smearing white porridge on a clean table.”

“Let’s stop smearing the porridge,” Rook answered, “I’ll try you.”

And the raiders gathered a council to think about Ben Creek. I was not on this council. But they say they have a council. The late Levka Byk was then the eldest.

- What is he doing under his hat, this Benchik? asked the dead Bull.

And the one-eyed Rook said his opinion:

Benya doesn't talk much, but he speaks well. He doesn't say much, but I want him to say something more.

- If so, - exclaimed the late Levka, - then we will try it on Tartakovsky.

“Let’s try it on Tartakovsky,” the council decided, and everyone who still had a conscience blushed when they heard this decision. Why did they blush? You will know about it if you go where I take you.

We called Tartakovsky "one and a half kikes" or "nine raids." "One and a half kike" was called him because not a single Jew could contain in himself as much impudence and money as Tartakovsky had. He was taller than the tallest policeman in Odessa, and weighed more than the fattest Jewish woman. And Tartakovsky was nicknamed “nine raids” because Levka Byk’s firm and company made not eight or ten raids on his office, but nine. The share of Beni, who was not yet the King, had the honor to make the tenth raid on the “one and a half Jew”. When Froim told him about it, he said "yes" and left, slamming the door. Why did he slam the door? You will know about it if you go where I take you.

Tartakovsky has the soul of a killer, but he is ours. He left us. He is our blood. He is our flesh, as if one mother gave birth to us. Half of Odessa serves in his shops. And he suffered through his own Moldavian. Twice they kidnapped him for ransom, and once, during a pogrom, he was buried with choristers. The Sloboda thugs then beat the Jews on Bolshaya Arnautskaya. Tartakovsky ran away from them and met a funeral procession with choristers on Sofiyskaya. He asked:

- Who are they burying with the choristers?

Passers-by replied that they were burying Tartakovsky. The procession reached the Sloboda cemetery. Then ours took out a machine gun from the coffin and began to pour on the suburban thugs. But the "one and a half Jew" did not foresee this. "One and a half Jew" was scared to death. And what owner would not be afraid in his place?

As soon as the wedding was over and they began to prepare for the wedding dinner, an unfamiliar young man approached the Moldavian raider Ben Krik, nicknamed the King, and said that a new bailiff had arrived and a raid was being prepared on Benya. The king replies that he knows both about the bailiff and about the raid, which will begin tomorrow. She will be here today, the young man says. Benya takes this news as a personal insult. He's having a party, he's marrying off his 40-year-old sister, Dwyra, and the spooks are going to ruin his party! The young man says that the spies were afraid, but the new bailiff said that where there is an emperor, there can be no king and that pride is dearer to him. The young man leaves, and three of Benya's friends leave with him, who return an hour later.

The wedding of the Raider King's sister is a big celebration. Long tables are bursting with dishes and foreign wines delivered by smugglers. The orchestra plays touches. Leva Katsap breaks a bottle of vodka on the head of his beloved, Monya the Artilleryman shoots into the air. But the apogee comes when they begin to give gifts to the young. Wrapped in crimson waistcoats, in red jackets, the aristocrats of the Moldavian woman, with a careless movement of their hands, throw gold coins, rings, coral threads onto silver trays.

At the very height of the feast, anxiety seizes guests who suddenly smell burning, the edges of the sky begin to turn pink, and somewhere a tongue of flame, narrow as a sword, shoots up into the sky. Suddenly, that unknown young man appears and, giggling, reports that the police station is on fire. He says that forty policemen left the station, but as soon as they were fifteen paces away, the station caught fire. Benya forbids the guests to go see the fire, but he himself goes there with two comrades. Policemen are bustling around the site, throwing chests out of the windows, the arrested are running away under the guise. Firefighters can't do anything because there was no water in the nearby tap. Passing by the bailiff, Benya salutes him in a military manner and expresses his sympathy.

How it was done in Odessa

There are legends about the raider Ben Krik in Odessa. Old Arye-Leib, sitting on the cemetery wall, tells one of these stories. Even at the very beginning of his criminal career, Benchik approached the one-eyed bandit worker and raider Froim Grach and asked to see him. When asked who he is and where he comes from, Benya offers to try him. The raiders, on their advice, decide to try Benya on Tartakovsky, who has contained as much insolence and money as no other Jew. At the same time, those gathered blush, because nine raids have already been made on the "one and a half Jew", as they call Tartakovsky in Moldavanka. He was twice kidnapped for ransom and once buried with choristers. The tenth raid was already considered a rude act, and therefore Benya left, slamming the door.

Benya writes a letter to Tartakovsky, in which he asks him to put money under a barrel of rainwater. In a reply message, Tartakovsky explains that he is sitting with his wheat without profit and therefore there is nothing to take from him. The next day, Benya comes to him with four comrades in masks and with revolvers. In the presence of the frightened clerk Muginshtein, the unmarried son of Aunt Pesya, the raiders rob the cash register. At this time, Savka Bucis, a Jew, late for work, drunk as a water carrier, breaks into the office. He stupidly swings his arms and with an accidental shot from a revolver mortally wounds the clerk Muginshtein. By order of Beni, the raiders scatter from the office, and he swears to Savka Bucis that he will lie next to his victim. An hour after Muginshtein is taken to the hospital, Benya appears there, calls the senior doctor and the nurse, and, introducing himself, expresses his desire that the sick Iosif Muginshtein recover. Nevertheless, the wounded man dies at night. Then Tartakovsky raises a fuss throughout Odessa. “Where does the police begin,” he yells, “and where does Benya end?” Benya, in a red car, drives up to Muginshtein's house, where Aunt Pesya is struggling on the floor in despair, and demands from the “one and a half Jew” sitting here for her a one-time allowance of ten thousand and a pension until death. After a squabble, they agree on five thousand in cash and fifty rubles a month.

The funeral of Muginstein Benya Krik, who was not yet called the King at that time, is arranged in the first category. Odessa has never seen such a magnificent funeral. Sixty singers walk before the funeral procession, black plumes sway on white horses. After the beginning of the memorial service, a red car drives up, four raiders led by Benya get out of it and bring a wreath of unprecedented roses, then they take the coffin on their shoulders and carry it. Benya makes a speech over the grave, and in conclusion he asks everyone to take them to the grave of the late Savely Bucis. The astounded present obediently follow him. He forces the cantor to sing a full requiem over Savka. After it ends, everyone rushes to run in horror. At the same time, the lisping Moiseika, sitting on the cemetery wall, utters the word "king" for the first time.

Father

The story of Benny Krik's marriage is as follows. Froim Grach, a Moldavian bandit and raider, is visited by his daughter Basya, a woman of gigantic height, with huge sides and brick-colored cheeks. After the death of his wife, who died in childbirth, Froim gave his newborn mother-in-law, who lives in Tulchin, and since then he has not seen his daughter for twenty years. Her unexpected appearance confuses and puzzles him. The daughter immediately takes up the improvement of her father's house. Large and curvy Basya is not overlooked by young people from Moldavanka, like the son of a grocer Solomonchik Kaplun and the son of a smuggler Moni the Artillerist. Basya, a simple provincial girl, dreams of love and marriage. This is noticed by the old Jew Golubchik, who is engaged in matchmaking, and shares his observation with Froim Grach, who dismisses the shrewd Golubchik and turns out to be wrong.

From the day Basya saw Kaplun, she spends all her evenings outside the gates. She sits on a bench and sews a dowry for herself. Pregnant women sit next to her, waiting for their husbands, and before her eyes passes the abundant life of the Moldavian - "a life full of sucking babies, drying rags and wedding nights full of suburban chic and soldier's indefatigability." At the same time, Basya becomes aware that the daughter of a draft cab driver cannot count on a worthy party, and she stops calling her father father, and calls him nothing more than a “red thief”.

This continues until Basya has sewn six nightgowns and six pairs of pantaloons with lace frills. Then she burst into tears and through her tears said to the one-eyed Froim Grach: “Every girl has her own interest in life, and only I live as a night watchman in someone else's warehouse. Or do something with me, papa, or I will make the end of my life ... ”This impresses Rook: dressing solemnly, he goes to the grocer Kaplun. He knows that his son Solomonchik is not averse to uniting with Baska, but he also knows something else - that his wife, Madame Kaplun, does not want Froim Grach, just as a person does not want death. They've been grocers in their family for generations, and the Capons don't want to break with tradition. Upset, offended, Rook goes home and, without saying anything to his dressed-up daughter, goes to bed.

Waking up, Froim goes to the owner of the inn, Lyubka Kazak, and asks her for advice and help. He says that the grocers are very fat, and he, Froim Grach, is left alone and there is no help for him. Lyubka Kazak advises him to turn to Ben Krik, who is single and whom Froim has already tried on Tartakovsky. She leads the old man to the second floor, where there are women for visitors. She finds Benya Krik at Katyusha's and tells him everything she knows about Bas and the affairs of the one-eyed Rook. "I'll think about it," Benya replies. Until late at night, Froim Grach sits in the corridor near the door of the room, from where Katyusha's moans and laughter are heard, and patiently waits for Benya's decision. Finally, Froim knocks on the door. Together they go out and agree on a dowry. They also agree that Benya should take two thousand from Kaplun, who is guilty of insulting family pride. This is how the fate of the arrogant Kaplun and the fate of the girl Basya are decided.

Lyubka Cossack

The house of Lyubka Schneiweis, nicknamed Lyubka the Cossack, stands on Moldavanka. It houses a wine cellar, an inn, an oatmeal shop and a dovecote. In the house, in addition to Lyubka, live the watchman and owner of the dovecote Evzel, the cook and pimp Pesya-Mindl, and the manager Tsudechkis, with whom many stories are connected. Here is one of them - about how Tsudechkis became a manager at Lyubka's inn. One day he sold a threshing machine to a certain landowner and took him in the evening to celebrate the purchase at Lyubka's. The next morning it turned out that the landowner who had spent the night had run away without paying. The watchman Evzel demands money from Tsudechkis, and when he refuses, he locks him in Lyubka's room until the hostess arrives.

From the window of the room, Tsudechkis watches how Lyubkin’s baby is tormented, not accustomed to a nipple and demanding mother’s milk, while his mother, according to Pesi-Mindl, who looks after the child, “jumps around her quarries, drinks tea with Jews in a tavern.” Bear“, buys contraband in the harbor and thinks of his son as of last year’s snow ... ". The old man takes the crying baby in his arms, walks around the room and, swaying like a tzaddik in prayer, sings an endless song until the boy falls asleep.

In the evening, the Kazak returns from the city of Lyubka. Tsudechkis scolds her for trying to take everything for herself, and leaving her own child without milk. When the sailors-smugglers from the ship "Plutarch", from whom Lyubka sells goods, leave drunk, she goes up to her room, where Tsudechkis reproaches her. He puts a small comb to Lyubka's chest, to which the child reaches out, and he, having pricked himself, cries. The old man slips him a pacifier and thus wean the child from the mother's breast. Grateful Lyubka releases Tsudechkis, and a week later he becomes her manager.

retold

When, having thoroughly admired the fire, Benya returned home, "the lanterns were already out in the courtyard, and dawn was breaking in the sky. The guests dispersed. The musicians dozed, with their heads on the handles of their double basses. like a cat holding a mouse in its mouth and gently tasting it with its teeth." Using the terminology of cinema, we can say that it was a panorama shot from one point, including seemingly equivalent details: fading lanterns, a brightening sky, an empty yard, slumbering musicians, Dvoira and her husband. But it was precisely this couple that Babel needed to draw the reader's attention to, and he combines the phrases about the guests and the musicians, enters a new one after them, and modifies the final one: "The guests dispersed and the musicians dozed, lowering their heads on the handles of their double basses. Only Dvoira was not going to sleep With both hands, she pushed the timid husband to the doors of their marriage room ... "This, seemingly insignificant, editing allowed him to show in a "close-up" against the background of the courtyard Dvoira, who had waited for the desired moment, and her newly-made husband, timid from the realization that it had come time to work off Sender Eichbaum's money.

The edition of this episode, in which it was published in the collections of 1925 and 1927, became the final one, which cannot be said about the story as a whole, because, as in that old joke, "you will already be laughing", but later Babel added to the text a dozen changes.

When the policemen, fearing sad consequences, tried to reason with the bailiff who started the raid, he, fearing "to lose face", categorically stated that "self-love" was dearer to him. Only, after all, the bailiff is not a police officer, and, moreover, not a policeman, who, to reinforce his own budget, did not hesitate to go to the apartments of wealthy citizens on holidays, where, in response to congratulations on duty, they brought him a shot of vodka on a silver platter and handed him a silver "rupee". And, unlike the city policemen, there were only eight bailiffs in Odessa - according to the number of police stations, they reported directly to the chief of police, were in an officer rank or in a class rank according to the Russian table of ranks and, one must think, they knew how to pronounce this far from a rare word, like self-love, with which Babel replaced the illiterate "self-love".

"Ennobled" was the letter by which Benya Krik asked Eichbaum to put money under the gate, frankly warning that "if you don't do this, something awaits you that is unheard of and all of Odessa will speak from you." Having once again re-read this phrase, Babel decides to confine himself to the colorful turnover "such that it is not heard", which is quite enough to convey the specific jargon of the King, and in subsequent editions, instead of the deliberate Odessaism "to speak from you", there appears an uncut ear "to talk about you ".

And at Dvoira's wedding, Eichbaum, who financed this action, at first looked at him with a "squinted eye", which smacked of a tautology, because in this case the eye always seems smaller. And in the final version of the story, the King's father-in-law, who was sitting at the table, sat at the table, was already condescendingly looking at everyone with a "squinted eye." Back in 1921, Babel wrote that the raiders threw their gifts there on silver trays "indescribably by a careless movement of the hand," and now the word "indescribably" is crossed out, because, if you think about it, everything is quite communicable, understandable and explainable. Generous, but not devoid of posturing friends of the King, in defiance of the rest of the guests, emphatically casually throw on the tray not some banal silver spoons, but real jewelry, showing with their whole appearance that this does not amount to anything for them and, in general, "know ours!"

And in other episodes, a lot is taken "behind the scenes", where an attentive reader, as in a good movie or real life, can think of something, be convinced of something, guess something. That is why, reading about how Benya forbade the guests to go watch the fire, and the musicians dozed off, but did not dare to leave the yard after the last guests until his return, it becomes clear who "played the first violin" there. In the same way, Babel does not write directly about why Eichbaum at first did not agree to marry his daughter to Benya, despite all sorts of promises, such as a dacha at the 16th station and a future pink marble monument at the first Jewish cemetery at the very gates. But it is easy to understand that his main argument was something like Ostap Bender, beloved by his companions, "Who are you?". And then, outraged by such injustice and offended in his best feelings, the raider Ben Krik had to delicately remind the owner of sixty dairy cows without one about the long-standing source of his wealth: “And remember, Eichbaum, you weren’t a rabbi in your youth either. talk about it loudly? .." With this "you, too," the King pacifies the ambition of the obstinate milkman, equalizes him with himself or even puts him one or two steps lower, because, according to him, probably, breaking the will of the deceased by forging a will is a dirty business, unlike the "honest raid" ... More or less clearly emerges "behind the scenes" and barely mentioned in the story of Aunt Khan. She could be an old gunner or a buyer of stolen goods revered in her circle, like the famous Sosya Bernstein, who also lived on the famous Kostecka, and in the same house with her two male colleagues. This public often maintained a grocer, buffet or pate shop for the blaziru, where, for the benefit and safety of the case, they fed a small police fry, from which Aunt Hana could well have learned "in advance" "for a raid." Unlike Manka from Peresyp, she was not among the wedding guests and, it seems, was not in the "retinue" of the King, but she considered it her corporate duty to warn him of the impending danger.

Aunt Khana sent a young man to Bena Krik, who, no one knows how soon, arrived with Kostetskaya at the neighboring Hospital, only expounding his thoughts at such a pace that while he was getting to the point, papa Krik could well have had time to drink, eat and repeat this cycle. But Benya, being in worries about the wedding, did not have time to listen to his lengthy tirades, answer rhetorical questions and impatiently hurried: "I knew about it the day before yesterday. Next?", "He wants a raid. Next?", "I know Aunt Khana . Farther?". In Babel's "concentrated" phrase, even punctuation marks carry the ultimate semantic load and often become the object of editing. This time, the author after each word "next" puts a dot instead of a question mark, as a result of which Benya no longer asks, but orders, because he is the King, and his interlocutor is just Aunt Hana's "six". And it was flattering for him, communicating with the King himself, to rise above his lowered level, just as a soldier often dreams of becoming a marshal or a child stands on tiptoe in order to appear taller. Therefore, having fulfilled Aunt Hana's order, he, most likely, by his own understanding, monitors the situation near the police station and, with the start of the fire, reappears at the wedding, where he enthusiastically tells Ben Krik about it, "giggling like a schoolgirl." But Babel, looking around with the eyes of a diligent gardener, seemingly carefully "weeded" story, removes this comparison, since such a manifestation of emotions is by no means the prerogative of schoolgirls, as well as schoolgirls, students, students and other young representatives of the fair sex.

Finally, Babel once again "touches" and finally finishes the first phrases of the story, because they are able to enchant, attract, intrigue, alert, disappoint or, God forbid, repel readers. Initially, in the newspaper "Sailor" the story began with the words "The wedding is over. The rabbi - magnificently beard and broad-shouldered - wearily sank into a blue chair. Tables were placed along the entire length of the yard." Two years later, when the story was published in the Izvestia newspaper, the rabbi, who in this case does not personify a specific person, appears before the readers devoid of individual features and they are given the full opportunity to complete his appearance according to their knowledge, imagination and understanding. And he no longer sits in a blue one, but simply in an armchair, which also has an explanation. An easy blue armchair should be upholstered in the appropriate color with velvet, silk or, in extreme cases, satin, but the inhabitants of Moldavanka could hardly afford such a luxury. Most likely, it was a simple hard chair, covered with varnish and equipped with semicircular wooden armrests, from the local Kaiser factory on Novaya Street, the last examples of which are still preserved today in the homes of the same last Odessa old-timers. After such a correction, the beginning of the story looked more concise: "The wedding was over. The rabbi wearily sank into an armchair. Tables were placed along the entire length of the yard." Before the next publication of "The King" in the journal "LEF", Babel supplements and recasts the third phrase in such a way that it is included in the chain of successive actions of the rabbi: "The wedding is over. The rabbi sank wearily into an armchair. Then he left the room and saw the entire length of the yard. And in the collection of 1925, the second phrase is combined with the third: "The wedding was over. The rabbi sank into an armchair, then he left the room and saw tables set up along the entire length of the yard." Now, it would seem, it was necessary to cross out the pronoun "he" and thereby "close" the phrase to one subject "rabbi". But Babel did not do this, because in this case the rhythm would have accelerated, and it might seem to the reader that the rabbi, as soon as he sank into an armchair, immediately got up from it and left the room. A short story is generally more “sensitive” to rhythm than, for example, a novel, which is why Babel used it as one of the tools for realizing a creative idea. And, as you know, the more tools, the better. True, there were masters who managed to work a masterpiece with just an ax, but the expression "clumsy work" also exists. Combining the two phrases, Babel omits the indication that after the wedding ceremony, the rabbi sank into a chair wearily. Indeed, this says little to the reader, who knows nothing about the rabbi himself - whether he is young or old, strong or weak. Subsequently, after the release of the collection, Babel removes the point between the first two phrases, combining them into one that is completely devoid of "mosaic", smoothly, easily and freely introduces the reader into the atmosphere of the story: "The wedding was over, the rabbi sank into an armchair, then he left from the room and saw the tables placed along the entire length of the yard"

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It seems, at least in the Russian translation, that the fourth chapter of Maupassant's novel Life, written eleven years before Babel's birth, begins and tells about the marriage of the main character Jeanne and Julien: "The wedding is over. Everyone went to the sacristy, where it was almost empty" . Of course, Babel could subconsciously and in general terms use the plot of one of the chapters of the novel he read and re-read - such cases are known in writing practice - especially since the words "the wedding is over" made it possible to avoid many unnecessary details and tie the beginning of the story to a specific moment. However, this is nothing more than a guess. But in any case, it is not necessary to speak of direct borrowing, if only because Babel stubbornly, for a long time and carefully finished the first phrase of the story, bringing it to a degree of perfection that satisfied him. And he strictly followed Maupassant throughout his entire creative life in another way.

In 1908-11, the complete works of Maupassant were published in St. Petersburg. And the young man, born and raised in the city, which was not in vain called "little Paris", introduced to French culture by Monsieur Vadon, at first, as they say, swallowed all fifteen volumes of the classic. And then he kept returning and returning to his short stories and novels pierced by the sun, "inhabited" not by incorporeal figures or moving silhouettes, but by the most living people with all their joys and sorrows, problems and worries, virtues and vices, nobility and deceit, passions and joys: "Dumpling", "The Tellier's Establishment", "Life", "Mademoiselle Fifi", "Dear Friend", "Mont Auriol" ... And the novel "Pierre and Jean" had a symbolic meaning for Babel , because in the author's preface to it, Maupassant most accurately, concisely and clearly revealed the secret of his work with the word: "Whatever the thing that you are talking about, there is only one noun to name it, only one verb to designate its action , and only one adjective to define it.And one must search until this noun, this verb, and this adjective are found, and one should not be satisfied with approximations, one should never resort to fakes, even ud acny, to language tricks, to avoid difficulties. Perceived as immutable and not promising an easy life, the edifications of Maupassant, who conquered the pinnacle of glory, could discourage young Babel, who began to think about literary work early, from his intentions. But they were also able to inspire hope, because if the master claims that one must seek, then one can find. And he erected for himself the words of Maupassant into a postulate, searched, as it were, found, crossed out, searched again. It was necessary to value, respect and trust the word in such a way that, often without a penny in your pocket, an extra sheet of paper and, as he wrote, "the lousiest table", in response to the editor's demand to submit a long-promised and paid story, half-jokingly, but categorically declare: "You can whip me with rods at 4 o'clock in the afternoon on Myasnitskaya Street (one of the central streets of Moscow - A.R.) - I will not hand over the manuscript until the day when I consider that it is ready." And sometimes he could only smile disarmingly and kindly ask: "As they say here in Odessa, or do you want me badly?"

It is not worth trying to check the harmony of the story "The King" with algebra, but elementary mathematics indicates that, since 1921, Babel has made more than two hundred edits to it. Similarly, we will not list them all and even more so characterize them. Let us be like archaeologists who do not fully excavate an ancient settlement or settlement, leaving some of them to future researchers armed with new knowledge, approaches, methods and techniques. But there are a few more examples that are a pity to ignore.

Without telling, but showing the reader the yard where the wedding festivities were about to break out, Babel first wrote that “tables covered with heavy velvet tablecloths twisted around the yard like snakes with patches of all colors on their belly, and they sang in thick voices - those bands of orange and red velvet." Only in the second version of the story, Babel does not indicate that the tablecloths are heavy, since this, in particular, is the quality of velvet and differs from other fabrics. On the tables now are not "velvet tablecloths", but simply "velvet", since the word "overlapped" defines both its purpose and location, "stripes of orange and red velvet" are replaced by "patches", which tablecloths are named in the first half of the phrase. As a result of this editing, "velvet-covered tables curled around the yard like snakes with patches of all colors on their belly, and sang in thick voices - patches of orange and red velvet." From this phrase, not only nothing can be thrown away, but nothing needs to be added, and the orange and red velvet singing with thick voices is an unexpected metaphor akin to color music, which was born by Scriabin's beautiful "Poem of Fire" and migrated to pop shows, bars and discos. And “behind the scenes” a naive Moldavian force is highlighted, in accordance with which the festive tables are covered with velvet instead of crisply starched white tablecloths, so familiar at family feasts, in restaurants, in the Fanconi cafe on Ekaterininskaya street and in the tavern on Greek Square, which was nicely called once then "White Tablecloth". The multi-colored velvet luxury at the wedding of Dvoira Creek was, apparently, specially purchased for this occasion, because for the tables that "poked their tail out of the gate on Hospital Street", no master's tablecloths, even if they were available, would not be enough to collect but the King would never allow them in their neighbors. True, during a stormy and violent meal, something will certainly spill on precious tablecloths, wake up, or be burned with cigarettes by tipsy guests, but is it worth worrying when Eichbaum pays?

At the festive table, he was sitting, as Babel wrote, "in second place" by right of man who assumed the wedding expenses - from the purchase of delicious dishes to the payment of musicians, then, as they say, everywhere. In the first place sat the bride and groom, but it was purely a table graduation. In fact, the first person at the wedding was Benya. And his friends were not the last to stay there, whom Babel dressed for the first time, as they say, to the nines: "The aristocrats of Moldavian - they were pulled into crimson velvet vests, their steel shoulders covered red jackets, and on fleshy plebeian legs with bones, crammed into suede shoes, steel-blue leather wanted to burst.

But in this form, this phrase survived only the first edition, and then work began on it, as if on a canvas: doubts, questions, assessments, searches, finds, disappointments, replacements ... Is it worth mentioning steel shoulders when, moving into the raiders, the Moldavian guys, of course, did not pass the qualifying medical examination and in their midst, for example, impudence was valued no less than “pumped up” muscles? Is it really necessary to call the feet plebeian because of the overgrown bones on the feet, which are the result of gout, and it does not at all distinguish between plebeians and aristocrats? Can the comparison of the colors of the softest leather and the hardest steel be considered accurate, and is it not possible to replace it with the same color of celestial azure, which everyone has seen, but no one has felt? And isn't it more fitting for the courtiers of the King of France to show off in blue suede shoes than for raiders at the wedding of the King of Moldavian? Should the skin “want to burst” or is it better to write that it simply “bursts”, and it will be clear to everyone that the fleshy legs of the raiders for the sake of panache are squeezed into tight shoes, and it doesn’t matter if these are shoes, boots or boots? Is it necessary to focus on the fact that raspberry vests were velvet, if they were also sewn from cloth, wool or some other fabric, and velvet was most often used for curtains, bedspreads, curtains, tablecloths ... By the way, when I once asked about this old Odessa tailor Kramarov from Kartamyshevskaya Street, he looked at me the way a specialist looks at an amateur: “You still don’t know how old I am? So in one month and six more days it will be one hundred and two years, just like on the dial , - he tapped with his fingernail on the old clock with a massive chain lying on the bedside table, - but so that I would never be one hundred and three if I ever worked on a velvet vest. Babel himself stopped "working" velvet vests and suede shoes for raiders who did not sin with sophistication of taste: "The aristocrats of Moldavian, they were pulled into crimson vests, red jackets covered their shoulders, and on fleshy legs the skin of the color of heavenly azure burst." Compared to the first edition, this phrase has become shorter, but the figures of the raiders are more clearly drawn at the wedding table, primarily due to the fact that each noun is now defined only by a single adjective, and one completely remains on its own without any, however, for him damage. This, in particular, happened with the story as a whole, from which, with numerous phased revisions, Babel mercilessly threw out no less than a quarter of all adjectives.

And about why, how and with what difficulty all this is done, how the perfection of the story is achieved, Babel, it seems, told Paustovsky back in their common stay in Odessa: “When I write down a story for the first time, then my manuscript looks disgusting, just awful! It is a collection of several more or less successful pieces, interconnected by the most boring official connections, the so-called "bridges", a kind of dirty ropes ... But this is where the work begins. Here its source I check phrase after phrase, and not just once, but several times... A sharp eye is needed, because the language cleverly hides its rubbish, repetitions, synonyms, just nonsense, and all the time seems to be trying to outsmart us. When this work is finished, I rewrite the text on a typewriter (so the text is more visible) Then I let it lie down for two or three days - if I have the patience for this - and again I check phrase by phrase, word by word, and I always find some more missed quinoa and nettles. So, every time I rewrite the text anew, I work until, with the most brutal captiousness, I can no longer see a single grain of dirt in the manuscript. But that's not all... When the garbage is thrown away, I check the freshness and accuracy of all images, comparisons, metaphors. If there is no exact comparison, then it is better not to take any. Let the noun live by itself in its simplicity... All these options are weeding, pulling the story into one thread. And so it turns out that between the first and last options there is the same difference as between the salted wrapping paper and Botticelli's "First Spring" ... And the main thing, - said Babel, - is not to kill the text during this hard labor. Otherwise, all the work will go down the drain, the devil knows what will turn into! Here you need to walk like a tightrope. Yes, that's it..."

In Babel's revelations, one can catch the intonations of Paustovsky, and this is not surprising. According to the author of the story "A Time of Great Expectations", this conversation happened at the end of the "merry and sad" summer of 1921 at the blessed 9th station of the Bolshoi Fountain after Babel allegedly showed him a thick, two hundred pages, manuscript containing all twenty-two versions of the story "Lyubka Cossack". But the story about Madame Lyubka first appeared only in the autumn of 1924 in the Moscow magazine Krasnaya Nov, and had it been ready, at least in the first version, in the summer of 1921, Babel probably would not have failed to send it to The Sailor or "News". And it's not just that. Judging by the story "The King" published at the same time, which looked more like a draft than a finished work, it is not very likely that Babel had already determined such clear principles for working on the word by that time. And if he did, then, being not the most open in everything that concerned his own creativity, he would hardly have begun to share them so frankly, especially since he never considered and did not behave like a master or mentor. And if, more than aspirations, he shared, it is hard to imagine that even Paustovsky, who treated him with the greatest reverence for almost forty years, as they say in Odessa, kept in his head everything Babel said with all the nuances and specific details. Or did he not need to remember anything? To substantiate such a daring assumption, we can recall that, having conceived "A Time of Great Expectations", Paustovsky arrived in Odessa, where he sat down in the Gorky Scientific Library, which he still remembered as "Public". And he studied there the dilapidated filing of the "Seaman" of 1921, in order to resurrect in memory and, in accordance with the romantic mood of the story, then imprint on its pages the then headline of the newspaper, its paper, layout, fonts and, most importantly, those who printed articles there, the marine chronicle, essays, poems, feuilletons, stories. Paustovsky initially intended to make Babel one of the characters in his book, and, having read in the hundredth issue of the newspaper the first edition of The King, which he had already forgotten, he marveled at its striking differences from the well-known canonical text, scrupulously analyzed them, and then skillfully "constructed" the author's brilliant monologue about the writer's labor. And this is quite legitimate, since Paustovsky did not at all intend to turn the story into a chronologically verified list of the Odessa events of the early 1920s, but, as far as it was permissible in the late 1950s, he sought to convey the very spirit of the era and create images of some of the people who inhabited it. Or maybe things were different...

But for the first image of Babel in fiction, written with a benevolent pen, by which the author incurred unexpected, offensive and even insulting claims from the editors of the Novy Mir magazine, we should only be grateful to Konstantin Paustovsky. In the same way, those who, despising the danger of such an act, saved Babel's letters, deserve our lowest bow. Now, after the disappearance of his archive and the death of his contemporaries, they have gained special value, if only because they retained the living voice of the writer, his thoughts, hopes, daring, torment and confession, like what Ize Livshits wrote about: "The only vanity what I have is to write as few unnecessary words as possible."

Indeed, Babel tirelessly recognized and mercilessly discarded such words, built up, as he called, the "inner muscles" of stories, sought to bring them closer to the "great traditions of literature", which he considered "sculptural, simplicity and figurativeness of art." The sculptor cuts off unnecessary pieces from a block of marble, releasing a figure hitherto hidden in it, and one wrong hammer blow on the instrument, like one unnecessary word, can ruin everything. As for the speed of this work, it depends on the creative individuality of the master. Once upon a time, an Odessa woman who returned from Italy admired the local sculptor: “You only need to think how he made a bust of my arm in half an hour!” Babel worked slowly, but made a "bust of the soul", releasing the hidden romance of the Moldavanka from the block of everyday life. The sculptor first sketches out the general outlines of the figure rather roughly, and only then works out and finishes the details with a finer tool, but the intermediate results of this work leave with fragments, crumbs and marble dust. Visible, or rather, revered traces of the stage-by-stage implementation of the writer's intention may remain in his draft manuscripts and, as the well-known literary critic and textual critic Boris Tomashevsky stated, "all editions and all stages of creativity are important for science."

The manuscript of the story "The King" has not been preserved, but the five author's editions of its text remaining on the pages of books and periodicals provide a happy opportunity almost "from the first moment to the last" to trace Babel's work on the text, which, in addition to purely qualitative changes, turned out to be in the final reduced by ten percent. And it seems that it has become much shorter, because the reader, in his perception of the story, no longer slows down at sharp turns of the plot, does not make his way through the fence of adjectives, does not stumble over inaccurate comparisons, is not distracted by the contemplation of unnecessary details. And the aphorisms flying by like poles outside the car window only emphasize the swiftness of the movement: “If you don’t shoot into the air, you can kill a person”, “Stupid old age is no less pitiful than cowardly youth”, “The lining of a heavy purse is sewn from tears”, "Passion rules the world." Continuing this "railway analogy", we must remember that the reader of the story "The King" then had an unsolicited opportunity, designed only for big originals, to transfer from a courier or, as they say now, a fast train to a so-called worker, who is not in a particular hurry and has a habit of stopping at every God-forgotten half-station or platform chosen by summer residents.

In 1926, Babel wrote and soon published the script "Benya Krik", which critics immediately called a film story and even a film novel, which, however, did not add any merits to him or to the film of the same name based on it. The first part of the script was an augmented version of the story "The King" "translated" into the language of the then silent cinema, and the laws of the genre, multiplied by the "rules of the game" adopted in the then "most important of the arts", did their job. Is it worth complaining about the fact that the magnificent replicas and dialogues of the characters turned out to be torn into narrow ribbons of titles, when the magic of the story itself evaporated overnight, its aphorism, romance, wisdom, dating back to myth, and laconism, reeking of significance. According to Babel's initial words, in the story of Benny Krik "it's all about the raid", and then this episode completely disappeared, Eichbaum himself disappeared somewhere, and the miserable informer who "settled" in the plot whispers to the bailiff the date of the wedding of the King's sister, as if about this the epochal event did not gossip all over Moldavanka ahead of time. And the sixty-year-old Manka from Peresyp no longer expresses her irrepressible delight with a piercing whistle, Benya does not advise her father to give up "these nonsense", Dvoira Krik does not stare carnivorously at her newly-made husband, but simply drags him to the double bed, and Aunt Khana's young assistant has no more to say To the king his eternal couple of words.

Aunt Khana, as you know, lived on Kostetskaya, and this particular address binding says more to Odessans than any lengthy description. In a different position, if not to say in ignorance, are readers from other cities and, especially, foreign ones. By the way, in the French translation of the story, the young man announces to the King that he was sent by "Aunt Khana from Kostecka Street." Only in Odessa they don’t say and didn’t say that, because everyone knows from an early age that Kostetskaya is not a square, a settlement or a summer cottage, but a street on Moldavanka. And in French it is impossible to say "Aunt Khana with Kostecka" - such is the specificity of the language, which, according to Babel, who spoke and wrote it fluently, "is honed to the utmost degree of perfection and thus complicates the work of writers." Difficulties and often insurmountable obstacles also arise when translating such specific, born in Odessa and, as Babel wrote, "its bright self-made word" expressions, turns and constructions, such as "Benya knows for the round-up", "you will find something that not heard", "what will happen to this?", "mines violate the holiday" and others. But the greatest difficulty is created, of course, by the skill of the author of the story, which requires, if not adequate, then at least a comparable level of translator.

Nevertheless, successfully or not very well, closer to the original or to the interlinear translation, but Babel's stories are translated and printed, periodically repeating this over the years and the emergence of new people who are eager for such a difficult task. And Hospital, Balkovskaya, Dalnitskaya, Kostetskaya, Prokhorovskaya - the legendary streets of Moldavanka, "crossing" Babel's stories, according to his words, today readers in England, Germany, Israel, Italy, Spain, USA, Turkey, France know., somewhere else. .. But only Odessans have the opportunity to touch the origins, look into the courtyards on Kosvennaya and Hospitalnaya, in which weddings once died down, whose echo remained in Babel's story, go to the "original" addresses of Rishelievskaya, Primorsky Boulevard, Red Lane, where " King" was written, prepared for printing and printed for the first time in typographic letters. And only the inhabitants of Odessa have every right and have considered it their duty to elevate the 80th anniversary of the first publication of The King, which marked the beginning of Odessa Tales, to the rank of a significant date. And only Odessans celebrated it in the only way worthy of a literary anniversary...

If, without naming names, you pronounce "Borya" or "Sasha", then this will tell absolutely nothing to anyone, because citizens with such euphonious names in Odessa are like sand on Lanzheron. But if you say "Borechka", then everyone who is not indifferent to the fate of our city will immediately understand that we are talking about Boris Litvak, the creator and director of the children's rehabilitation Center on Pushkinskaya Street, the good angel of this, as he is called, "House with an Angel" . And those who have touched the cultural life of Odessa and follow the book novelties, having heard "Borya and Sasha", will immediately understand what they mean Boris Eidelman and Alexander Taubenshlak, respectively the director and editor-in-chief of the Optimum publishing house, whose famous philologist, Professor Mark Sokolyansky invariably calls them "optimists". Indeed, you need to be such that at your own expense, fear and risk, in our difficult time, a collection of Babel is published, moreover, in a very considerable circulation.

This idea was born in the basement occupied by the publishing house, shrouded in blue cigarette smoke and flavored with red Bessarabian wine, and then turned into a book in which destinies, principles, coincidences intertwined. It turned out so by chance, but it is symbolic that the publishing house is only a block and a half away from that house on Dvoryanskaya Street, where, at the behest of his father, Babel took violin lessons from Maestro Stolyarsky himself. But it is not at all accidental that the philologists Borya and Sasha, who, of course, would have found the words and time to roll up five or even ten pages of the preface, limited themselves to a few introductory phrases, rightly believing that in this case "the best preface There is an author's name on the cover. It was possible to include in the collection a variety of Babel's works, only publishers - the author's native countrymen considered it necessary for the first time to collect everything written by him about his native city under one cover and dedicate the book to the anniversary of the story "The King". It was possible, finally, without any trouble to emboss it in Odessa, but, unfortunately, it would not have turned out the way one wanted. And the publishers had to make several trips to Simferopol, where the local craftsmen managed to create a book, fine, like a piece of good bread and warm, like a woman's affectionate hand. And placed there, in particular, a wonderful lithograph by the famous artist Ilya Shenker, who has been away from Odessa for many years. And in his workshop now works inseparable from Odessa, like Odessa from him, Gennady Garmider, whose works on the themes of Babel's stories are also included in the book. Opposite Garmider's workshop, in the basement on Belinskaya Street at the corner of Lermontovsky Lane, Eduard Bagritsky once lived, and his pencil drawing, depicting the mighty bindyuzhnik Mendel Krik with the same whip and a glass of vodka, precedes the play "Sunset" in the book. A kind of "invitation to the book" depicts on the cover a savory "red watermelon with black pits, with slanting pits, like the eyes of crafty Chinese women" - the work of Tanechka Popovichenko, whose ancestors from time immemorial lived on Peresyp, which, according to Babel, is better than any tropics. And what makes this book absolutely delightful are the words of Babel’s relative Tatyana Kalmykova, full of light sadness and quiet joy, who still lives in the blessed Moldavanka, not far from the long-destroyed “family nest” addressed to the reader ...

I think Babel would be pleased with this book. As for the opus about the "King", it could cause the author's sly and ironic smile, since the story takes only a few pages, and I had to write about it .., however, the reader himself knows how much I had to write, unless, of course , he had the interest and patience to master it to the end.

"Laughing word" as the most urgent problem in the study of I. Babel's short prose. Characteristics of the novel "King". Death in the artistic world of I. Babel as the starting point of a farce scene. Analysis of the main characters of the short story "How it was done in Odessa".

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One of the most urgent problems in the study of short prose by I.E. Babel can be called the use of the "laughing word" by the writer. Understanding the category of poetics by M.M. Bakhtin, which is “realized in “ritual-spectacular forms”, “verbal and laughter works”, in “forms and genres of familiar-street speech”, it can be noted that “Odessa Stories” is a more than productive narrative field where the “laughter word” is manifested through carnival "laughter images", which constitute an essential part of the general poetics of the novelistic cycle.

The title image of the first short story in the "King" cycle is quite traditional for comic folk culture. The king and the jester, disguised as a king, are indispensable participants in any carnival, at the end of which the impostor is debunked. At the beginning of the story, the false king is the new bailiff, who represents state power. He is convinced that "where there is a sovereign emperor, there is no king", so he decides to raid Benya Krik (King of Thieves) during his sister's wedding. At the end of the story, according to the law of the carnival, Benya Krik, the real King of the Moldavian woman, debunks his opponent: “The policemen, shaking their backs, ran along the smoky stairs. The firemen were zealous, but there was no water in the nearest faucet. The bailiff, that same broom that cleanly sweeps, stood on the opposite sidewalk and nibbled on the mustache that climbed into his mouth. The cleansing fire of the burning area serves as a talisman of the wedding action, which the bailiff wanted to destroy, for which he was punished.

Carnival time is wedding time. In "Odessa Stories" the wedding is one of the main events in the life of a Moldavanka. Two weddings are described by Babel in the short story "The King": the marriage of Beni with Tsilya and Benya's sister Dvoira Krik "with a feeble boy bought with Eichbaum's money".

Marriage to Tsilya, Eichbaum's daughter, is accompanied by motives of abundance and fertility: "The newlyweds lived for three months in fat Bessarabia, among grapes, plentiful food and sweat of love." We can agree with the opinion of M.B. Yampolsky, for whom the love that struck the heart of the King was a new victory for Crick, and not a "defeat", as Babel wrote with irony, "his initiation by maturity."

The second wedding organized by the King is a buffoonery. A cry for Eichbaum's money buys a fiancé for her sister Dvoira: "Forty-year-old Dvoira, disfigured by illness, with an overgrown goiter and protruding eyes, sat on a mountain of pillows next to a frail boy bought with Eichbaum's money."

If the regenerating power of Beni Krik's wedding on Tsilya is conveyed through the obesity of Bessarabia, then in the second we observe the "protrusion" of the carnival world through an overgrown goiter and Dvoira's eyes protruding from their sockets. If the first wedding is a celebration of love, then the second is her travesty, and the “newlyweds” the forty-year-old sister Krika and the “puny boy” are a clown couple who will play their circus reprise at the end of the story: “Only Dvoira was not going to sleep. With both hands, she pushed her timid husband to the door of their marriage chamber and looked at him carnivorously, like a cat that, holding a mouse in its mouth, gently tastes it with its teeth.

Researcher M. B. Yampolsky draws a parallel between The King and the short story from Babel's Cavalry, Pan Apolek. According to him, Crick's courtship is a parody of the gospel story: Beni's orange suit and Christ's orange kuntush, Eichbaum's instantly healed blow, which immediately "rose" and the second miracle of Christ in Galilee. The literary critic compares Deborah from the parable of Apolek with her carnival image Dvoira. Correspondence is established on the basis of "symmetric inversion:" the elephant quality of Deborah's husband corresponds to the "mouse" in Dvoira, Deborah's vomit is savoring Dvoira's unfortunate mouse, clamped in his mouth ".

Referring to the well-known statement by V.N. Turbine: "And the Gospel Carnival", one cannot deny the presence in the Babel cycle of comic allusions to the "Gospel text". Despite this, one must be careful when comparing the images of Benya and Christ, Dvoira and Deborah, since M.B. Yampolsky draws a parallel between the stories published two years apart (The King, 1921; Pan Apolek, 1923).

Babel refers to the image of the wedding in the story “Father”, when he describes the raiders going to the brothel of Ioska Samuelson: “Their eyes were bulging, one leg was set aside, in each carriage there was one person with a bouquet, and the coachmen, sticking out on high seats, were decorated bows, like best man at weddings. The episode parodies and hyperbolizes the “wedding train” motif, which creates a grotesque image of the triumphant, bulging world of the Moldavian woman and compensates for the lack of a description of another wedding of Baska Grach and Benya Krik.

The marriage of the daughter of Froim Grach and the King of Thieves is not depicted by Babel, but, knowing that the word of Beni Krik does not differ from the deed, there is no doubt that the wedding took place. Most likely, her description did not fit into the artistic world created by Babel in Odessa Tales. The masculine Baska and the handsome Benchik would have been a comical couple, while the wedding itself, built on a monetary contract between Crick and Froim Grach, would have looked buffoonish, which made the appearance of the king noticeably faded in the eyes of readers.

Despite the absence of a description of a marriage of convenience, I.A. Esaulov notes that “in essence, the carnivalism of Babel’s artistic world is only external, since it hides a very rational approach to “dominion”, when everything is decided by money, not passion. In part, one can agree with the logic of the researcher's thoughts, but the material background of the events does not correspond to the romanticized artistic world of Moldavanka, in which, according to Babel, "passion rules."

If we turn to the original origins of the wedding, then in itself it goes back to the ritual meal, "producing" the genus. Therefore, when analyzing the wedding of Dvoira Creek, banquet images deserve special attention.

On the creative power of food and drink M.M. Bakhtin wrote: “Eating and drinking is one of the most important manifestations of the life of the grotesque body. The features of this body are its openness, incompleteness, its interaction with the world. The body goes beyond its boundaries here.

At the beginning of the story "The King" the preparations for the dinner arranged in honor of Dwyra's wedding are described: sang in loud voices.

The apartments have been turned into kitchens, where a “fat”, “drunken and plump flame” blazes; the symbolic expansion of the image of the hearth pushes the boundaries of the space of the artistic text. Hyperbolicity in the description creates a feeling of a universal feast, which is confirmed by the implicit likening of curly, “like snakes”, tables, which, not fitting in the yard, “poked their tail out of the gate”. The traditional image of the tiny eighty-year-old Reizel, the mistress of the wedding kitchen, is both a comic contrast between the tiny Reizel and the giant kitchen in which she "reigns", and a symbol of fertility (the Reizel is a hunchback, and the hump in the "laugh culture" is endowed with productive power). Fertility is conveyed through the description of feasting abundance: “At this wedding, turkeys, fried chickens, geese, stuffed fish and fish soup, foreign wine and oranges from the environs of Jerusalem were served for dinner.”

The energy condensed during the wedding feast gets an outlet: the Jewish beggars, “having sucked like treif pigs” of Jamaican rum, tap their crutches, and the raiders begin to rage: “Leva Katsap broke a bottle of vodka on the head of his beloved. Monya the Artilleryman fired into the air. Drunkenness and beatings are an integral part of both the wedding action and the carnival-laughter culture in general.

If the wedding of Benny Krik with Baska is a “carnival hoax”, then for “wedding cuffs” you can take the beating of a drunken man by Lyubka Schneiweis in the short story “Father”. She beat "with a clenched fist in the face, like a tambourine, and with the other hand supported the peasant so that he would not fall off," after which "he fell on the stones and fell asleep." The scene looks comical, thanks to the comparison of the man's face with a tambourine and the author's commentary on the actions of the boy-woman. The top of comedy is an unexpected ending. Beatings ending in sleep, or a bandit raid, the result of which is a magnificent funeral, organically fit into the Moldavanka carnival.

In the short story “How It Was Done in Odessa”, the funeral of the clerk Muginshtein, who was accidentally shot dead by a drunken raider, becomes a holiday that does not differ in solemnity from a wedding: “Odessa has not yet seen such a funeral, but the world will not see it. The policemen wore cotton gloves that day. Sixty chanters walked ahead of the procession. The elders of the synagogue of kosher poultry traders led Aunt Pesya by the arms. Behind the elders were members of the society of Jewish clerks, and behind the Jewish clerks were sworn attorneys, doctors of medicine and midwives of the paramedics ... ".

Death in the artistic world of Babel is the starting point of a farcical scene, for example, the rich man Tartakovsky meets a funeral procession that buries him, Tartakovsky, but a machine gun is in the coffin, and the procession itself turns into raiders who attack the suburban thugs.

The Moldavian accepts death as a holiday, as a travesty, and even as a mockery.

The story "Father" tells about a stop in Odessa by Russian Muslims returning from holy places. One of the pilgrims is near death, but refuses medical assistance, because "he who ends on the way from God Muhammad to his home, he is considered the first lucky and rich man among them ..." The watchman Evzel mocks the patient: "Khalvash, Yevzel shouted to the dying man and laughed, here comes the doctor to treat you ... ".

As suggested by I.A. Yesaulov, such laughter is possible only over the “suffering and dying “stranger”, which is not part of the people's grotesque body, in this case over a non-believer. Within the framework of the opposition “one's own stranger”, the comical context becomes clear, where the episode with the death of the mullah is interspersed: drunkards lying around “like broken furniture” in Lyubkin’s yard, and Benya Krik having fun with the public woman Katyusha. Such a neighborhood, reducing the pathos of death, affirms the immortality of the life of the Moldavanka, which Baska from Tulchin saw, with "sucking babies and wedding nights full of suburban chic and soldier's indefatigability" .

Death in the carnival culture of laughter is also the other side of the emerging life. Davidka from the final cycle of the story "Lyubka Cossack" symbolizes the fruit of love of the weddings of the Moldavian described above. Babel deprives the genetic mother of Davidka not only of maternal traits (Lubka Kazak drinks vodka while standing, beats a peasant, swears, bears a male nickname), but also the ability to feed her child. When Lyubka runs out of milk, Tsudechkis puts "a thin and dirty elbow" into her mouth.

This gesture of Tsudechkis can be seen as a kind of familiarity that is established between the participants during the carnival. This also includes the abusive appeals of the heroes (Lyubka "prisoner", "shameless", "foul mother", Tsudechkis "murlo", "old rogue"). The original point of view of M.B. Yampolsky, who believed that "the cubit is the obvious "male" equivalent of the chest, but also of the barren phallus" . Perhaps this is due to the fact that Davidka's mother, according to Tsudechkis, is "mean" and "greedy", that is, in the carnival world she is "barren" and cannot have children. Then it becomes clear why Babel introduces the scene of weaning the child from the mother's breast. Now the hospitable, loving Moldavian woman will take care of the baby, whose carnival laws the wise Tsudechkis will teach Davidka.

Davidka, Lyubka Kazak, Tsudechkis and other heroes of Babel's "Odessa Tales" are flesh and blood "Moldavian, our generous mother". Using the definition of M.M. Bakhtin, we can say that Babel depicted in the cycle "the folk-festive concept of a born, feeding, growing and reviving popular body" . Davidka, adopted by a Moldavian woman, will take the place of King Beni Krik in the future, as evidenced by the royal name of the baby (cf. the Jewish king David). But the fate of the "new" King is hidden in the stories of Tsudechkis, which the author is going to tell about in the next short stories. Thus, Babel denotes the incompleteness of the Moldavanka carnival, which has stepped over the boundaries of the Odessa Tales cycle, splashed out beyond the temporal, spatial and official boundaries in order to gain immortality.

Thus, the analysis of the "laughing word" in the "laughing images" of Babel's short stories suggests that his role in the narrative fabric of the text is significant.

funny word novella

Literature

1.Babel I.E. How it was done in Odessa. M., 2005. S. 111 145.

2. Bakhtin M.M. Creativity Francois Rabelais and folk culture of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance M., 1990.

3. Esaulov I.A. "Odessa stories" by Isaac Babel: the logic of the cycle // Moscow. 2004. No. 1. S. 204 216.

4.Turbin V.N. About Bakhtin // Turbin V.N. Shortly before Aquarius: Collection of articles. M., 1994. S. 446 464.

5. Yampolsky M.B. Structures of vision and physicality // Zholkovsky A.K. Babel / BaBe1 / A.K. Zholkovsky, M.B. Yampolsky. M., 1994.

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