Boris Nosik There was a whole world - and there is no Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur

The Text Publishing House would like to thank the author's family and friends for their help in preparing the publication of this book.

Increasingly, these ads:
Cousins and family
Regrets again...
“Today you, and tomorrow I!”
We die in order -
Who in the morning, who in the evening
And to the graveyard
We lay down, evenly, side by side.
Incredibly funny:
There was a whole world - and it is not.
Suddenly - no ice hike,
Not Captain Ivanov
Well, absolutely nothing!
Georgy Ivanov, 1941

* * *

Turret Levan. Maritime Alps. France

Information from the publisher

Art electronic edition

Nosik B.

There was a whole world - and it does not exist ... Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur / Boris Nosik. – M.: Text, 2016.

ISBN 978-5-7516-1441-6

The sad line from the poem by Georgy Ivanov, which became the title of this book, very accurately reflects its spirit and meaning: the best sons and daughters of Russia rested far from their homeland - and, as a rule, not of their own free will. About those who are buried in numerous Russian cemeteries in the south of France - the last book by Boris Mikhailovich Nosik (1931-2015), a subtle ironic prose writer, a chronicler of Russian emigration in France, the author of many biographies, including the biographies of Akhmatova, Modigliani, Nabokov, Benois, Zhukovsky, Schweitzer. The attentive reader will once again experience pride and bitterness: Russia gave birth to so many people gifted with great talents, high morality and fortitude, and she lost all these people as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War of the early 20th century.

The book uses photographs by T. Nosik, D. Popov, E. Ushakova, P. Shidyvar

Cover photos by D. Popov: Roussillon-sur-Thine, Mimozny Borm

Illustration on the frontispiece by D. Popov

Anton Nosik. Father's last book

The book you are holding in your hands is the last work of my father, writer Boris Nosik, who died in Nice in February 2015. The book is devoted to a topic that my father has been studying in depth for more than 30 years: the fate of Russians who moved to France in different years of the 19th and 20th centuries and ended their days here.

Boris Mikhailovich Nosik - by that time a well-known writer in the USSR, screenwriter, playwright, journalist, translator of Ivlin Waugh, biographer of Albert Schweitzer - moved from Moscow to Paris in the early 1980s. Within the walls of the Turgenev Library, he encountered representatives of the first Russian emigration, people whose very names were banned in the USSR at that time. Among them were the descendants of famous aristocratic families, writers, artists, scientists, musicians, politicians of the pre-revolutionary era, officers of the White Army ... He made friends with them, wrote down their memories, got access to family archives and unpublished memoirs - and soon became a devoted chronicler of history " Russian France”, to the fate of which he devoted dozens of books, stories, reports and television programs. After the abolition of censorship in the USSR, the topic was no longer taboo, and Boris Nosik's books about the life of Russians in France in the 20th century found readers and publishers in Russia.

Not being a historian by education and vocation, but having spent his whole life traveling, to compile his historical chronicles, Boris Nosik often turned to the guidebook genre, tying plots to the area in which they unfolded. This latest book is no exception. It tells about the cemeteries of the South Coast of France, the famous Côte d'Azur, about the life and death of people buried here, and at the same time it can be used for quite practical purposes, traveling along the Mediterranean Sea, from Grasse to Menton, through the departments of Var and Alpes-Maritimes , finding here places that are significant for Russian history, but not previously mentioned in any guidebook ... Or you can read this book without any tourist need - as an unexpectedly detailed story about the glorious, but, alas, little-known pages of our history.

Boris Nosik himself was buried in Nice, in the Russian cemetery of Kokad, next to many heroes of his last book - such as co-author Kozma Prutkov, poet and official Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov, poet and critic Georgy Adamovich, White General Nikolai Yudenich, Most Serene Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukova ( the morganatic wife of Alexander II), the tsarist Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov (who convinced Nicholas II of the need to participate in the First World War), the composer Leonid Sabaneev and Henrietta Hirshman, whose portrait by Serov still adorns the walls of the Tretyakov Gallery. But the life of the author and his characters continues in the story that you are about to read.

Anton Nosik

To the shelters of the magic coast

On the Cote d'Azur (and quite radiant) Coast of France lived in the last century and a half, many of our glorious compatriots. Even if there were not so many of them as other Europeans, Asians, Africans or Americans, but still regularly came here, to the warm coast, and our compatriots who had frozen over the winter: warmed up, talked with each other, and then, a little bored with the coast and the lack of communication (whether it was St. Petersburg, Moscow, London or Paris!), they were going on the way back. But not everyone was destined to return from this wonderful shore: many stayed here ... So our new book for many of them will become, as it were, a return to their homeland, albeit virtual, albeit belated ...

They came here, as we know, for reasons of varying degrees of seriousness, so they did not always go in a cheerful mood. However, when they got there, getting out of the carriage or the train car (or even completely stepping onto the gangway of the plane at the airport), they involuntarily smiled at the friendly sun, flowers, the rustle of palm trees and the brilliance of the Mediterranean Sea, tickling the garlic smell of Provencal cuisine.

What was it that so irresistibly attracted them here, our unforgettable ones? Some ardently hoped here to be healed of the curse of those times, consumption, and other ailments (this was the majority of visitors); others just wanted to take a break from the bustle of the capital, boring work, the boring grayness of the sky, or even just from complete idleness; still others fled from life's failures in their native north, from persecution, slander, slander of enemies and all sorts of falsehoods (above the sea, you know, a little heifer).

Later, after 1917, they fled in a mournful crowd from the rapists, who managed to seize power in their country by deceit and force, fencing it off from the whole world for many decades, so much so that it became possible to unite with their relatives who remained in captivity or return to their native places. impossible for exiles. For a long time the refugees hoped for changes, for their return, for a meeting with their loved ones, they waited for an hour. And they waited a year, and three, and eight, and ten, and twenty ... And then they lost hope. Fading away on this shore, in the city of Hyères, the Russian poet then wrote in despair:

A quarter of a century is already abroad.
And hope is ridiculous.
radiant sky over Nice
Forever became a native sky ...

Under this sky, they died, and here they were buried on the slopes of the azure mountains and in picturesque gorges. In some places special Russian cemeteries were arranged in the villages. And sometimes, by chance, you suddenly stumble near the local coast on a Russian name and dates of life. Get excited: fellow countryman! And it seems that the name is not entirely unfamiliar. Here's to remember in more detail who she was this Praskovya? Is this Avdotya? Lydia? George? This Ushakov? Sidorov? Faltz-Fein? Meranville? .. However, even without remembering exactly, you can still lay a flower on a stone, a flower that is as warm and short-lived as you and I. Put it down, and it seems like your soul will feel better.

I myself am one of those people who, from a young age, loved walking in cemeteries more than in noisy parks of cultural recreation with their crowds. In my maturity, I noticed by reading various books that I was not the only scatterbrain in the world. Such even French writers come across, convincingly inviting their readers for a walk along Père Lachaise or some other Parisian necropolis ...

And now I have decided to invite you on a pilgrimage to the Russian graves on the French Cote d'Azur of the Mediterranean Sea, which has long been inhabited by Russians. It is clear that the aforementioned antiquity and population density of Russian habitation on this coast are quite insignificant in comparison with the antiquity of the local settlement or its population density. And yet it left a mark in the depths of our culture, and we should not lose it, since the time has come to collect, and not scatter stones. That is why I invite you to this new pilgrimage in France, this time again along the French Riviera.

As for the cities, villages and hidden corners of the Riviera, through which our journey will pass, their incomparable southern beauty has long been known to the sublunar world. Magic corner of the planet. And the general direction of our journey, I hope, will not seem aimlessly sad to you. I hope it will give my fellow travelers a purifying sense of duty done, an opportunity to once again reflect on life and death, a new sharpness of perception of the shining world ... They cannot help but lead them to reflect on the life of bygone generations, who had not only the 19th, but also the bloody 20th century with all its upheavals. As for our involuntary sadness and sympathy, it seems to me that these experiences and thoughts that accompany our pilgrimage are not at all useful, and may even turn out to be beneficial.

One of the French authors once wrote about the paths of old cemeteries as "a crossroads for reflection, the best corner for walks, during which you can mentally weave the patterned lace of your own life over other people's graves."

I remember that after moving from Moscow to France (more than thirty years ago) I was endlessly occupied with the history of those of our compatriots who once found themselves here in exile. Most of them, even before their exile and flight, managed to live a brilliant century in their abandoned homeland. How did they behave in the new circumstances, when they lost their families, fortune, all prestige, family and friendship ties, profession, native places and family nests? It was a cruel test for them. It is not surprising that some of these ardent idealists, proud snobs, or refined aesthetes experienced an almost complete fall here and became the scum of society. Another thing was surprising: that so many survived in these conditions and retained their inner dignity. That they retained energy, thirst for activity, social temperament, selflessness, kindness, love for people and for the abandoned, inaccessible homeland, which every year became something else, less familiar and understandable.

The émigré destinies of these compatriots will pass before you in our cemetery journey, on this “best of walks” (in the words of M. Dansel mentioned above), in our pilgrimage to Russian graves scattered along the magical coast of the Riviera ...

From heavenly Hyères to Mimosny Borm and the village of Lavender

Our pilgrimage to our native graves will be, as you already understood, a journey through the cemeteries of the ancient picturesque villages of the Mediterranean coast. It is difficult to give up the hope that the attention we have shown to the last refuge of the departed will not be indifferent to those who have gone to another world near these places. This is partly why I invite you on your journey.

I decided to start it in the city of Hyères, which is in the department of Var, four kilometers from the famous Cote d'Azur. The town arose near the sea, but still not on its very shore: it is less than an hour on foot from it to the sandy beaches of the Jien Peninsula. The Phocian Greeks founded the first settlement here in ancient times, so that already four centuries before the birth of Christ, the Hellenic Olbia ruled here. In the 10th century, the city was mentioned as Hyères, but before it became a winter refuge for northerners-foreigners seeking warmth and relief from ailments, another good eight centuries passed. The city, surrounded by a fortress wall, rose near the mountain range, on the slope of the Kasteu hill. From these walls, King Louis the Saint once moved on the Seventh Crusade, and as for the castle of Hyères, it was already dismantled in the 17th century by order of Louis XIII. After that, more than three centuries passed until the last local military skirmish with the enemy in August 1944, when the Americans and the British, together with a division of the Senegalese, cleared the coast from the Germans, who more willingly, of course, surrendered to the Americans and the British than to the Senegalese. Thus, the last world war was ended here: again, as before the war, sick foreigners were drawn to the town of Hyeres, which the American writer Scott Fitzgerald once called "the most charming of all places on earth."

The Anglo-Saxons' long-standing passion for gentle Hyères is quite understandable. Anyone who has spent at least one damp, chilly winter on a green British island will easily guess that the first foreigners-bokogreys were to be the British. One of the first (more than two centuries ago) the British ambassador warmed himself on this shore, ten years later (in 1788–1789) the Prince of Wales wintered in Hyères, setting a good example for all London nobility, and in 1791 even an English novel was published. , which takes place in Hyères. So, with the European nobility and with belles-lettres, little Hyeres has quite old and prestigious connections. The creator of the famous "Treasure Island" Robert Louis Stevenson, having settled here in 1863, publicly declared that it was "almost a paradise." Queen Victoria rested in Hyères for a good three weeks, but the biggest (and closest to literature) event took place here before Stevenson and before the Queen, namely in 1860. I am going to dwell on it further in detail, but for now, a few words about the town itself, as I first saw it.

Dotted with southern flowers, rustling with palm trees, Hyeres still retains traces of its venerable and picturesque antiquity. The tower of the XII century, which once housed the command of the Templars, rises in the center of the city on Macillon Square. Behind the square, narrow medieval streets meander, jealously preserving the cobblestones. On one of the streets, the bare facade of the “old man’s house” blinds your eyes, on which ten years ago I advised the local authorities to nail a memorial plaque with the name of a remarkable Russian poet who spent the last years of his life in this house and died in it, having managed to write his own letters here. new, absolutely intoxicating verses. His name was Georgy Ivanov, and if the authorities in Hyères did not follow my advice, it was probably not only because no one here reads books in Russian. Simple - who needs the advice of wandering foreigners? There is no time to listen to one's own... As Ivan Bunin, who lived not far from here, rightly noted, even under Soviet rule, no one ever consulted with anyone.

The reference here to Bunin, which is not at all accidental, brings me close to the name, without the mention of which not a single feast took place in Bunin's Riviera house. To the very name with which I was going to begin our pilgrimage to the Russian graves. To the only Russian name that was heard, maybe even in the city hall of Hyères. To the Russian name, which is also remembered at the local city cemetery. This name is TOLSTOY. I am sure that when general literacy will flood these shores, and any French worker, even some kind of cybernetician or mathematical doctor of science, will say: “Well, I remember this name: Leon Tolstoy. He also has a brother in Hyères lying in the cemetery ... "

NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH TOLSTOY, the beloved older brother of Lev Nikolaevich, died in Hyères at the very beginning of October 1860 and was buried in the city cemetery "Paradise". This tragic event was one of the greatest shocks in the life of the younger brother of Leo, the great writer of the Russian land.

Nikolai Tolstoy (family name Nikolenka) was also a writer, even published once in Sovremennik and was warmly received by its famous publishers - Nekrasov, Turgenev, Panaev. The sketch of the thirty-year-old Nikolenka "Hunting in the Caucasus" remained the only essay published by him during his lifetime. Nikolenka had neither the temperament, nor the ambitions of his younger brother, nor his perseverance and energy. But he was a kind, high-minded man. He was more attached than others to his mother, who died so early. The seven-year-old naughty Kolya (Koko) was left for the eldest in a gang of orphans, and the widowed father, placing great responsibility on his children's shoulders, once wrote: "I recommend Koko to be an example of obedience and diligence for his brothers." Surprisingly, Koko understood and accepted this responsibility and became an example and educator for his younger brother and sisters. He called Levushka "my dear disciple." And I must say, in this capacity as an educator, he showed the talent and imagination of the writer. He invented games and fairy tales for younger children, taking them in search of some kind of magic “green stick” buried in a park on the edge of a ravine. On it, they say, secret words were written that will help to destroy evil in people and reveal all the blessings. Nikolenka's childhood inventions, retold later by his younger brother, made a considerable impression on the Russian intellectuals. For example, I happened to read that, having reached free Paris a century later, Russian exiles (among them the writer Don Aminado and the great Karaim grocer Aga) began a new life by publishing a children's magazine: children had to grow up differently so as not to share the humiliation of the exiled fathers and grandfathers. And it was not by chance that the name for the new magazine came to their minds exactly like this: “The Green Stick”.

The life of Nikolenka Tolstoy proceeded in accordance with the tradition of his circle. At the age of 16, he entered the mathematical faculty of Moscow University, then studied at Kazan University, then served in artillery near Moscow. Having received a hereditary estate during the division of property, he retired to the estate, read poetry at his leisure, wrote, hunted. Then he returned to military service, served in the ever-rebellious Caucasus, was repeatedly awarded orders for bravery in business, and at the age of thirty-five he retired with the rank of staff captain. And besides, he remained the same kind, honest, slightly apathetic (from his youth he preferred not to visit, but to wait for his friends to come to him), sensitive brother ...

His letter to his relatives has been preserved about how hard it was for him to hand over his serfs (he had 317 male souls) as recruits: “I don’t know what is better: to see how a soldier dies in action or how they see off the serfs, as we call them. Our poor, kind Russian peasant! And when you realize that you can’t alleviate his fate in any way, you will become somehow disgusting and annoying for yourself.

How often do you hear something like this these days, even from prominent patriots, humanists and "rulers of thoughts"?

Shortly after retiring, when Nikolai read smart books and translated the Bible on his estate, it turned out that the ubiquitous consumption that nestled in his body went on the offensive. His relatives took him for treatment to the warm country of doctors, Germany. But autumn in Germany that year turned out to be cold, Nikolenka got worse, and then the younger brother moved the patient to the vaunted French city of Hyeres, where it is still warm. I went with my brothers and sister Maria, burdened with children. The sister rented a villa by the sea, and the brothers stayed at a boarding house on the current rue Curie. Nicholas's health was rapidly deteriorating. The younger brother Leo recalled the fading of the elder: “He did not say that he felt the approach of death, but I know that he followed her every step ...”

Not having lived in Hyères for even a month, Nicholas left our world and his younger brother, whose despair was boundless. “Not only is this one of the best people I have met in my life,” Lev Nikolayevich wrote, “<…>that the best memories of my life are connected with it? “He was my best friend.”

The theme of death is firmly included in the work of the brother-writer. Then, in Hyères, and for many years after Hyères, it seemed to the shocked Leo Tolstoy that what had happened before his very eyes with his brother made human life itself meaningless. He wrote in a letter a few days after the tragedy: “... he literally died in my arms.<…>Why bother, try, if from what was N.N. Tolstoy, nothing left.<…>What’s the point of everything, when tomorrow the pangs of death begin with all the abomination of meanness, lies, self-deception, and end in insignificance ... "

To everyone, even a deeply religious aunt, Tolstoy writes in those days about his hatred of death. Death is the end of everything. What then is the meaning of life?

The theme of death runs through almost all the works of Leo Tolstoy, and only after the rebirth that took place in him at the end of the seventies does he come to terms with it, no longer believing that this is the end of everything. Actually, already in “War and Peace”, talking about the death of Andrei Bolkonsky, Tolstoy writes that “that formidable, eternal, unknown presence, which he did not cease to feel throughout his life, was now close to him and - according to that strange the ease of being that he experienced - almost understandable and felt ... ". Tolstoy writes about the "simple and solemn mystery of death", about death as an awakening and even a new birth.

By the end of the seventies, he came to the conclusion that death is only a transition to another being, that living well means dying well. To die is simply to go back to where you came from. Maybe the person is just changing the way they travel… “I’m glad that I don’t stop thinking about death,” he writes of his “joyful readiness for death.”

Death came to the younger brother in its turn, and at that time it was a shock to all thinking Russia. In his biographical novel, V.V. Nabokov tells how his young parents, who were abroad at that time, took the news of this death. This news seemed to require some kind of decision from them, the intellectuals. And they decided to return to Russia ...

After the death of his brother, Lev Nikolaevich remained for some time in Hyères, lived in a villa rented by his sister Maria, traveled to Italy, and studied the education system in France. This was his last foreign trip.

Some two decades after the burial of Nikolai Tolstoy, it was on the site of the Paradise cemetery that the town decided to build a new school. Since the grave site of N.N. Tolstoy was paid for "forever", his ashes were transferred to the "Ritort" cemetery, as well as the remains from other graves paid for eternal rest. However, it is not difficult to guess that in places where land becomes more expensive every day, and land speculation is more and more merciless, we can only dream of peace. In the end, the local authorities made a completely practical decision regarding the brotherhood of the departed (without, of course, taking into account their wishes, earthly titles, hopes, occupation, past activities). The remains of the “forever” buried Russians, resettled from the former cemetery, were demolished for convenience and economy into one common grave, on which a solid stone tombstone brought from Russia was installed, and on it were carved the names of Russian citizens who died in Hyères from tuberculosis while still young. The list opens with the name of Count Nikolai Nikolaevich Tolstoy, who lived in the world for 37 years ...

Other Russians buried here lived even less: MILOSLAV KIRKOVSKII from Vilna - thirty-three years old, STANISLAV VSESLAVSKII did not live to be thirty, the EDZHEKHOVSKIY spouses, Count ARSENIY MOSHEN, Count PETER KOZLOVSKY, EKATERINA RUBAKOVA ...

If you move from Hyères along a picturesque road leading to the northeast, then in about half an hour you will reach a fabulous ancient town on a mountain that almost hangs over the sea. A typical mountain village: narrow streets shaded by arches, flowers, cacti, lemons, pine trees…

The ancient Romans called this town Bormani. Later, he became Borm, more precisely, even Pine Borm. And only in the twenties of the last century, the inhabitants of Borm asked to rename their picturesque town to Mimozny Borm. The authorities went to meet the aspirations of the people: the mimosa brought from the Mexican campaign transformed the streets of the city.

The beauty of this tiny town was repeatedly sung by passing and passing poets, including Russians. One of them (the once well-known poet Sasha Cherny in St. Petersburg) wrote at the end of his life quite tenderly:

Borm is a wonderful town,
Walls leaned against the rocks
The palm trees leaned towards the roofs.
In the niches shade and chill ...

And many, many more smiling poetic Russian lines were written about Borma by a poet-exile who was in love with this Provencal town, once known to all the capital Petersburg and happily abandoned on this Russian coast at that time.

The mimosaic town of Borm, a delight for artists and poets, has until recently breathed Russian memories. I also noted them there, passing from the main square and the chapel of St. Francois de Paul to the gates of the local cemetery, from the fence of which there is a delightful view of the emerald valley and the blue expanse of the sea.

As soon as you enter the cemetery, you can see a Russian tombstone, which is important for our story. The mention of it, as, indeed, of all this cemetery, did not even get into the prestigious necropolis book of retired colonel Romanov, which was recently published in Moscow, but meanwhile with the names of APOLLINARIA ALEKSEEVNA SHVETSOVA (1877–1960) and BORIS ALEKSEEVICH SHVETSOV buried here ( 1873-1939) was due to the unforeseen spread of Russian speech on the local coast.

Boris Alekseevich and Apollinaria Alekseevna were Siberians, originally from the distant Trans-Baikal Kyakhta, once a bustling town on the trade route. From Eastern Siberia to China, from China to Siberia, camel caravans stretched through Kyakhta. The town was adorned and prospered. The local ladies sewed dresses for themselves in Paris, they invited tenors from Italy to concerts in Kyakhta ... Of course, they were engaged in charity, as they should be, they read a lot, collected valuable libraries.

True, with the construction of the railway (CER), the commercial importance of Kyakhta began to decline, but at the end of the 19th century, the town was still going through good times. And Boris Alekseevich Shvetsov, buried here, was just born at that time in the family of a local tea merchant. While still very young, he mastered the science of tea trading, by smell he could distinguish varieties of tea from afar, he became a prominent person in Kyakhta (where he had a friendly conversation in Mongolian with the chief lama), and then in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and even in London he became known. He was a commerce adviser, a member of insurance and exchange societies. He had his tea trade offices all over the world, so that with the advent of the Russian general ruin in the new century, he did not completely become impoverished. He had a house near Paris, as well as land near Pine (later Mimosa) Borma, not far from the coast in the village of La Favière. His neighbor and interlocutor in La Faviera was Lyudmila Wrangel, the daughter of a doctor and writer S.Ya. Elpatyevsky, who treated M. Gorky, who knew A. Chekhov, and in general the entire Moscow artistic world and the entire Crimea. Among other wonders of the then accessible abroad, this famous writing doctor and the local illustrious coast were described, on which his daughter later lived with her husband, a builder and Baron N. Wrangel (who, by the way, ended his life here): “Here she is, finally, Riviera, live, real Riviera, that dressed up brilliant beauty, as she is pictured to us!<…>the bright blue sky, deep and brilliant, and all around the blue sea, leaving the eyes into that wide distance where the colors merge and where you cease to distinguish the sea from the sky. How bright, green and joyful all around, and how everything stands out brightly and convexly. Everything is alien, outlandish." Cheerful, ironic Dr. Elpatyevsky painted all this even before the advent of the terrible age, when the wonderful coast he described unexpectedly sheltered his exiled readers and was no longer alien or exotic to them. And what he could not foresee at all, the famous doctor, that his own daughter Lyudmila would take such an active part in the settlement of the local coast. So not only patients do not foresee their fates, but also doctors, who were advised by the colonizers of this coast, the ancient Romans, to heal themselves first of all ...

It so happened that the energetic daughter of the famous doctor Yelpatyevsky, Lyudmila, who had grown up and married an engineer (already at the beginning of a new, beginning to go crazy century), founded a small dacha settlement of the Russian intelligentsia on the rocky coast of the Western Crimea, in Baty Liman. And later, after the Russian catastrophe and flight from Russia, here in La Favière, talking in the evenings with the experienced Siberian Boris Shvetsov (she perfectly described later in her memoirs this “overweight, with an unbuttoned collar on a mighty Siberian chest” businessman and lover books), suggested that he buy a piece of land from a peasant neighbor (a hill near the coast), then divide this land and sell the plots for country houses for Russians. And so they did. The former residents of the Crimean Bata-Liman, former metropolitan celebrities such as the Kadet leader, historian and journalist Pavel Milyukov and the artist Ivan Bilibin, were the first to start building dachas. Then the writer Kuprin, artists Korovin, Goncharova, Larionov, Rozhankovsky, scientists (Frank, Kogbetlyants), composers (Grechaninov, Cherepnin) and poets (Tsvetaeva, Poplavsky, Sasha Cherny) appeared on this shore ...

This is how it arose on the French coast, if not the famous Crimean Koktebel or the not quite famous Baty Liman, then the Provencal La Favière, memorable for the Russian emigration.

Boris Alekseevich Shvetsov died in these places. He died in 1939, like many Russians, without having survived the shock of another war of the damned century. Here he rests, in the little cemetery of Mimosa Borm.

Having reached the most picturesque (southeastern) corner of this cemetery, I saw the family grave of the princes Obolensky. It contains one of the many branches of the Obolensky princely tree. They say that the princely tree is one of the most sprawling in the last five centuries of Russian history (from the Obolenskys, as reported, the Dolgorukiy, and the Shcherbatovs, and the Repnins went). After all, in the French exile there were at least three branches of the genus. The patriarch of that branch, which gave shelter to a picturesque grave in the cemetery in Mimozny Borma, was Prince VLADIMIR ANDREEVICH OBOLENSKY (1868-1950), a truly outstanding person. He was born in St. Petersburg in the family of Prince Andrei Vasilyevich Obolensky and Princess Alexandra Alekseevna Obolenskaya (née Dyakova). Andrei Vasilyevich was the son of a hero of the Patriotic War, a state councilor, a public figure and, according to Leo Tolstoy, a good person. Contemporaries note that a quite worthy Petersburger A.V. Obolensky had one uncomfortable, albeit very common, addiction - to playing cards, which greatly undermined the family's prosperity. The not too significant attention that Leo Tolstoy paid to the qualities of Prince Andrei Vasilyevich is most likely due to the deep impression made on the great writer in his young years by his future wife A.V. Obolensky, that is, the mother of Prince Vladimir Andreevich buried here - Alexandra (Alexandrin) Dyakova. She was truly a wonderful girl. She was the daughter of Baroness Dahlheim de Limousin, who fled from the bloody French Revolution to the court of the Russian Empress Catherine II. There were quite a lot of refugees from France at that time, and they were received quite kindly in Russia. (With a sound understanding of all the changes, it can be noted that those who later fled to France from the even bloodier Russian revolution were received much more indifferently.)

The Text Publishing House would like to thank the author's family and friends for their help in preparing the publication of this book.

Increasingly, these ads:

Cousins and family

Regrets again...

“Today you, and tomorrow I!”

We die in order -

Who in the morning, who in the evening

And to the graveyard

We lay down, evenly, side by side.

Incredibly funny:

There was a whole world - and it is not.

Suddenly - no ice hike,

Not Captain Ivanov

Well, absolutely nothing!

Georgy Ivanov, 1941

Turret Levan. Maritime Alps. France

Information from the publisher

Art electronic edition

Nosik B.

There was a whole world - and it does not exist ... Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur / Boris Nosik. – M.: Text, 2016.

ISBN 978-5-7516-1441-6

The book uses photographs by T. Nosik, D. Popov, E. Ushakova, P. Shidyvar

Cover photos by D. Popov: Roussillon-sur-Thine, Mimozny Borm

Illustration on the frontispiece by D. Popov

Anton Nosik. Father's last book

Anton Nosik

To the shelters of the magic coast

A quarter of a century is already abroad.

And hope is ridiculous.

radiant sky over Nice

Forever became a native sky ...

Cover of Boris Nosik's book "There was a whole world - and it doesn't exist... Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur" (Publishing house "Text", 2016)

The Moscow publishing house "Text" is preparing for release in April the last book of the writer, journalist, translator Boris Mikhailovich Nosik(1931-2015). The book is a pilgrimage to the places of the Cote d'Azur, which forever sheltered exiles from distant Russia. “Under this sky they died, and here they were buried on the slopes of the azure mountains and in picturesque gorges,” the author writes. The insinuating wanderer-researcher will lead his no less attentive readers through the pages of eternal memory of those who left their homeland during the years of the civil war and revolution.

“She talks about the cemeteries of the South Coast of France, the famous Côte d'Azur, about the life and death of people buried here, and at the same time it can be used for quite practical purposes, traveling along the Mediterranean, from Grasse to Menton, through the departments of Var and Maritime The Alps, finding here places that are significant for Russian history, but not previously mentioned in any guidebook ... Or you can read this book without any tourist need - as an unexpectedly detailed story about the glorious, but, alas, little-known pages of our history, ”shares in the introduction, the writer's son Anton Nosik.

With the permission of the publisher, we publish an excerpt from the book “There was a whole world - and it doesn’t exist ... Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur”.

Having descended from Borm to the "Russian beach" La Favière, one must certainly visit the cemetery of the neighboring town of Lavandu, where the famous St. expressed in the famous poem:

Live on top naked
Write simple sonnets
And take from people from the valley
Bread, wine and meatballs.

Although the top of the “Russian hill” in La Faviera was not completely bare, but, on the contrary, quite blooming, the poet, humorist and satirist Sasha Cherny found his new paradise in this corner of the Riviera. Bread and wine were ridiculously cheap here, and his dear wife Marya Ivanovna sometimes pampered him with cutlets. So, without complaining about the poverty of emigrant life, the poet sang of the charm of Provence, the brilliance of the sea, the comfort of the tiny Mimosa Borma and the village of Lavandou next to Favier.

Sasha Cherny's former satirical poems, which were very popular in Russia, mocked the fashionable ideas of the metropolitan and provincial intelligentsia, their traditional efforts to get closer to the "common people" ("The lodger and Fekla on the couch"). All this was now behind us. The impoverished Russian intelligentsia was in a less enviable position here than the former common folk Thekla, so that Sasha Cherny's poems left even the remnants of the former mockery of their brethren, of the intelligentsia's clumsiness. And what was the use of mocking the poor, the vanquished, the losers. The poet himself confessed to his satirical timidity: "Be careful with the recumbent, especially if he is your immigrant brother."

And where should he go now, an emigrant? At home, there was “a gloomy and infringed Soviet life, as incomprehensible to us as China is to foreigners.” And the poet looked with pity at his fellow emigrants. Here they come ashore for a short poor rest with miserable poor belongings:

In suitcases bathing rags,
And alcohol lamps, and a Russian novel.
Above is a tin box.
Rumbles like a dashing drum.

And Russopets wander along the beach.
Children drag bags under their arms,
An old man in an antediluvian coat
He straightens his socks as he goes.

One of the many tangible losses of emigre life for such former Petersburgers, as the poet was until recently, was the inability to “help the poor,” as was once customary in Russia. And now a man of the old upbringing at the time of emigrant poverty is looking for opportunities to become a patron of the arts. Sasha Cherny feeds hungry cats, and at the same time sneers at his own need for patronage. Oh, this former weakness of his was well remembered by his friends. The writer Mikhail Osorgin recalled that “every time when there were fees for the unemployed, for children or charity evenings, A. Cherny was among the first to make an appeal.<…>And out of personal kindness, and out of personal understanding of what need is, and, of course, for the sake of the only joyful satisfaction - that it’s possible, as if having nothing, to give more than the one who has ... "

In his last poems, Sasha Cherny did not get tired of singing this corner of Provence, finally given to him by fate, where he died untimely, not yet at all old. In 1932, a fire broke out on a farm next to his house, and the poet ran for buckets and shovels to put out the fire. He overheated in the sun, got worried, and his heart could not stand it ...

A young Russian poet, who was staying near Lavandu in those days, wrote dejectedly: “Under the mountain, the vineyards were unbearably and joyfully green. It was strange to see, against the backdrop of this natural beauty, how four people slowly rose from the Mouton farm with a coffin. Among the porters "guard champetre" 1 in a cap with silver piping, a farmer friend of many years ... "

1. Rural policeman (fr.).

Boris Nosik

There was a whole world - and it is not

Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur

The Text Publishing House would like to thank the author's family and friends for their help in preparing the publication of this book.

Increasingly, these ads:
Cousins and family
Regrets again...
“Today you, and tomorrow I!”

We die in order -
Who in the morning, who in the evening
And to the graveyard
We lay down, evenly, side by side.

Incredibly funny:
There was a whole world - and it is not.

Suddenly - no ice hike,
Not Captain Ivanov
Well, absolutely nothing!

Georgy Ivanov, 1941

Turret Levan. Maritime Alps. France

Information from the publisher

Art electronic edition

Nosik B.

There was a whole world - and it does not exist ... Russian chronicle of the Cote d'Azur / Boris Nosik. – M.: Text, 2016.

ISBN 978-5-7516-1441-6

The book uses photographs by T. Nosik, D. Popov, E. Ushakova, P. Shidyvar

Cover photos by D. Popov: Roussillon-sur-Thine, Mimozny Borm

Illustration on the frontispiece by D. Popov

Anton Nosik. Father's last book

Anton Nosik

To the shelters of the magic coast

A quarter of a century is already abroad.
And hope is ridiculous.
radiant sky over Nice
Forever became a native sky ...

“Growing up is a lifelong lesson in the ability to create a feasible feast. And those who have not built their little world are willingly rebuilding the world, ”the poet wisely mocked. The fact that it is really possible to rebuild for the better both the world and people by writing wonderful literary texts was believed by millions of Russian intellectuals for two centuries. And the inevitable collapse of this literary religion became the greatest pain and the main spiritual event for the entire creative part of the Russian emigration of the 1920s and 30s.

Fer then ke?

Active reading of the memoirs and biographies of the great Russian Parisians of the interwar period sooner or later causes bewilderment in the modern reader. We see people who suffered primarily from lack of demand - but who did not try to work in a Western way; who tried to change the world by contemplation - and this is in the West, whose civilization is based on non-contemplative principles.

Why on one Gaito Gazdanov, who worked for 24 years as a taxi driver, and before that unloaded ships, washed steam locomotives, worked as a teacher, and in his old age collaborated with Radio Liberty, for which he had to move from Paris to Munich (and all this did not kill him at all muse), - there are a hundred writers who, following the example of Georgy Ivanov, refused even to engage in journalism and translations, so as not to clog their souls?

This inability to act was recorded by Teffi with her inherent irony - albeit using the example of an officer, not a writer: “They told me: a Russian refugee general went out to Place de la Concorde, looked around, looked at the sky, at the square, at houses, at shops, to a motley, talkative crowd, - he scratched the bridge of his nose and said with feeling: “All this, of course, is good, gentlemen. It's all very good, too. But ... ke fer? Fer then ke?" *

*Que faire? (fr.) - What to do?

After all, the named Gazdanov, although he wrote in Russian, was a Poltava-Kharkovite of Ossetian origin - and Caucasians outside the Caucasus bite into life obviously more tenaciously. By the way, a remarkable nuance - the great prose of Gazdanov, evaluated by Europe at the level of the same Bunin and Nabokov - remained misunderstood not only by Russian fellow emigrants, but also by the domestic intelligentsia of the perestroika years, which did not leave, as a result of which it remains little known to us to this day.

Vladimir Nabokov himself, the only carrier in this cohort of an initially non-Russian approach to literature, is why we do not perceive him as a Russian émigré writer: he was in some ways an American and clearly an American writer even when he wrote in Russian and lived in Europe.

But almost the rest of the Russian emigration 1920-30s years in France was divided into two diametrically opposed groups. On the one hand - people who knew how to arrange life for themselves and their loved ones. On the other hand - the creative intelligentsia, which categorically did not know how to do this.

Of course, the division is not absolute: superfluous people were also found among non-literators (non-philosophers, non-artists, non-musicians). And Russians who knew how to arrange themselves sometimes came across among the creators. True, those much more often found themselves not in France, but in civilizationally close Serbia or in the “pre-revolutionary Russian colonies” of then China. And even immediately in America, where there were more opportunities to get a job - and where sooner or later the majority of the Russian emigrants of the first wave who survived until the end of World War II moved.

In addition, the majority of the Orthodox church intelligentsia belonged to the first group of emigrants, who are well equipped with family, domestic or monastic life. This is easy to prove: if an ecclesiastical émigré intellectual has descendants, they almost without exception become native speakers of the language of the surrounding country - but this would greatly upset non-church intellectuals.

Sect of peacemakers

Actually, why the writers "did nothing" is understandable. They felt themselves to be the bearers of a gift, a great mental-linguistic gift - and considered it unthinkable to exchange this gift for something less than great literature. Half of Russian literature, including fairy tales, and a quarter of Middle Eastern literature have been written about the fact that high inaction is higher than fussy businessmanship. It is in Russian literature that, in addition to the images of “superfluous people”, a bright dotted line shines, starting with Pushkin’s “blessed laziness” and passing through the figure of Oblomov to the main characters of Dostoevsky, who, although they move a lot, think and speak, but do not act differently in life.

The most amazing thing is that while the writers lived in Russia, with such a position they managed not only to survive - but also to live with constant spiritual nourishment of their gift. And the point in Russia was not even in the noble "innate" capital of many writers of the 19th century - and not in the high fees of the Golden and Silver Age of Russian literature (including sky-high incomes of many thousands arranged by Gorky in his publishing house "Knowledge" - after the release of the first the writers of the books calmly went on a trip around Europe for a couple of months, not even thinking about their daily bread in the coming year).

Note that many emigrants before leaving for Europe managed to live the first post-revolutionary years in their homeland, when they no longer had not only fees, but also heating. Yes, and their very shelter with food (even in the Petrograd "House of Arts") were on the verge of some kind of life ridicule and disappearance. However, even then Russian writers were in their native element.

It was the element of a sacred, sacred, secretly effective relationship to the written word. The element of religious perception of literary events - and the literary environment itself. “For Russia, literature is a starting point, a symbol of faith, an ideological and moral foundation,” such a creed is not only contained in the wonderful collection of literary and educational essays “Native Speech” by Weill and Genis: their introduction to Russian literature begins with these words .

So, until the fall of the USSR, for the vast majority of Russian people, literature was one of the most powerful religious components. And for the writers themselves, the literary process was the life of some powerful clergy sect, directly influencing the fate of the world. It would not be a sin to say that Russian writers (and to a slightly lesser extent philosophers, artists, musicians) directly felt themselves to be priests of this literary - but the whole world by its means embracing - religion.

They weren't redundant. For example, any European or American, having learned about the term "superfluous people", easily writes down in them not only Pechorin, but also his author, the restless Lermontov. But in fact, the patriarch of literature (a very young, but undoubted patriarch), having already written a tenth of his undoubted classics and seeing its distribution (and in Russian realities this means: a powerful and massive worldview impact), already, roughly speaking, slept peacefully and perished Generally speaking, I wasn't afraid. He accomplished the main task of the Russian intelligentsia - and thus fulfilled the super-task, which is to change the world with texts.

Of course, the circle of readers of the classics was a small percentage of the population of the empire. But the collective subconsciousness of this circle invisibly influenced the multi-ton machine of the collective subconsciousness of the rest of the empire's population, regardless of nationalities. And the collective subconscious of the intelligentsia was controlled by fresh literary texts in a completely unusual for the world, literally manual mode.

The reflection of this super-reality of literature also fell on foreign authors. Neither in England, nor in any other country, were there so many Byronites - transferring the intonations of an English poet into their very own life. There could not have been such a Silver Age anywhere, with its monstrous religious-erotic current that sparkled the life of writers - although this phenomenon grew partly out of the poetry of French symbolism.

Finally, nowhere would Emperor Nicholas I be perceived by the next generations as a kind of moderately significant politician of the Pushkin era, known mainly for interfering with the life and work of the latter. And in none of the countries that fought in the First World War, this war could not become less significant in the perception of writers than the St. Petersburg literature cafe "Stray Dog" - as it happened in Russian minds.

"Leaders of souls, not masses"

And now a good third of the creators of this Silver Age (and teenagers who look up to them, who soon also become poets) ended up in France in the 1920s and 30s. The most amazing thing is that here they tried to continue the same Russian tradition of changing the world with literature. But if publications and literary concerts with crowded halls for the time being give them minimal means, then the absence of a change in the world, a change in the collective subconscious, could not be hidden from their texts.

The West does not change and does not seethe through and through either from the work of the nobelist Bunin, or from the work of Nabokov, Tsvetaeva, Khodasevich with Berberova, G. Ivanov with Odoevtseva, not to mention Adamovich, Otsup, Ladinsky, Boris Poplavsky and so on. Nothing comes from the organizational efforts of Merezhkovsky and Gippius; their “Green Lamp” circle does not at all reach the “atmospheric” level of religious and philosophical meetings and workshops of poets of the early twentieth century in Russia.

However, the first decade of emigration, the literary intelligentsia is not very worried about this - the mass belief in the imminent "end of the Bolsheviks" and the return to their homeland is still strong. But when, by the 1930s, it was discovered that Europe would fall sooner than the then USSR; when it became clear that even the predominant mass of Russian emigrants seeks to connect to the collective subconscious of the West, and not to their own intelligentsia; when it turned out that the perception of literature, even among “their own”, acquired a global type - either publicly entertaining, or literary-scientific, but not at all ideological - a terrible demolition had to occur.

And it happened very symbolically - being framed as a one-time event. In 1932, the Russian poet and publicist Gorgulov, who wrote under the significant pseudonym Pavel Bred, shot dead the virtuous and patriotic 75-year-old French President Paul Doumer. It was only in 2011 that an event appeared that stood in line (not in terms of the number of victims, but in terms of symbolism) with this gorgulovism - the act of the Norwegian Breivik on the island of Utoya - this parallel was immediately noted by Dmitry Bykov. Of course, both graphomaniacs, both 80 years ago and a year ago, had some justification for their actions, which took up an immense number of pages - but it is even more senseless than the actions themselves. More important for us is something else: the subconscious desire of both crazy terrorists to warn the world about something in such an extravagant way - undertaken after warnings in the form of a text did not affect the world.

Then, in the same 1932, another writer - also, like Gorgulov, of Kuban-Cossack origin - Elizaveta Skobtsova, the living "bearer of the Silver Age", - took monastic tonsure with the name Maria (now Mère Marie has been canonized by the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the guise of martyrs ).

And even earlier, in 1926, a young, successful "literary nobleman" - the poet Dmitry Shakhovskoy - was tonsured - in the future he will become the most prominent bishop of American Orthodoxy. These signal bells were supposed to demonstrate to the literary emigration the impossibility of living in the West by their former literary world-changing standards, to show the need to get out of this circle. But almost no one heard the bells.

And the Nobel Prize in Literature, received in the next 1933 by Ivan Bunin (and in fact - by the entire Russian emigration in his person), was to become the tombstone of this intellectual idea - after all, in fact, Bunin's "Life of Arseniev" itself was an auto-epitaph to the former collective subconscious . However, as often happens with us, instead of a feast for literary emigration, there was a “galvanization of the corpse,” as Bykov calls this Russian phenomenon.

“Tenderly whirling in an afterlife waltz at an emigrant ball”

The writers cheered up. And the sense of absurdity continued to grow. In 1935, the talented 32-year-old poet Boris Poplavsky left the world. In 1939, the elderly Vladislav Khodasevich also died of an illness (but obviously of a depressive origin).

In 1941, Tsvetaeva passed away - contrary to popular belief, it seems to me that her departure was not due to her stay in the USSR in the last couple of years of her life, but, on the contrary, not staying in it before that - she was saturated with a poisonous depression of a purely emigrant nature.

Finally, Antonin Ladinsky also undergoes a remarkable kind of tonsure - from the end of the 1930s he becomes an ultra-devout socialist, writes naively servile poems about collective farmers, and in the end he is thrown out of Paris, I think, to his own joy. He happened to finish writing "Anna Yaroslavna - Queen of France" already in the USSR, not far from the homeland of the main character.

In many writers, the loss of moral sensitivity is too noticeable - but not at all in the spirit of the mystical-erotic Silver Age. We are talking about things that cannot be explained by a physiological "eclipse", much more thoughtful and cowardly.

For example, Odoevtseva in her memoirs “On the Banks of the Seine” describes at least four terrible acts of Georgy Adamovich (he lost money at the casino for her own apartment and, moreover, forced her to recoup in Monte Carlo, knowing that it was already pointless; started a false rumor that Odoevtseva and her husband during the occupation arranged receptions for German officers - such a “denunciation” in the late 1940s in France meant the loss of friends and well, if not prison; in the hungry years, he mocked the girl, forcing her to look for food allegedly available in the house, which actually did not exist, and so on). But it is amazing: the memoirist does not feel that she is talking about abominable abominations for the reader, about the literal stench of the soul, about a person who is completely “hands-shaking” after any of such acts; it is more important for her that Adamovich is a good poet.

In addition, in émigré memoirs we meet an unusual number of creative people who are terribly afraid of being left alone. The strange mass nature of the neurosis shows its subconscious nature: the soil was pulled out from under the literary-centric personality, thrown into an airless space - this is how they felt it. The last poems of Georgy Ivanov well convey the mystical horror of this God-forsakenness.

It sounds blasphemous, but I am sure that many emigrant writers sometimes envied their Soviet brethren who were dying in the camps and bending under power. When Stalin called Pasternak and asked about Mandelstam, or when, together with Voroshilov and Beria, he visited the sick Gorky, this was, after all, a sign of belonging to the destinies of the world, the fulfillment of the secret dreams of a Russian writer.

What was hiding the grain

It was only in the 1950s, after the tectonic shift of World War II, that émigré writers came to terms with the annihilation of their literary faith. It is noteworthy that the French-writing science fiction writer of Russian origin Natalia Henneberg (Enneberg) in the very first novel “La naissance des dieux” (“The Birth of the Gods”) brings out the poet, scientist and astronaut among the last people left on earth who have the opportunity to create new creatures from the fog - So, both non-poets produce normal "constructive" creatures, people and animals, while the poet invariably produces monsters... This was the verdict of the "literary religion".

But the realization of this meaninglessness and collapse has given rise to such masterpieces as Georgy Ivanov's dying poems, with which, in terms of the strength of despair, little can be compared.

And only a few authors have found ways out of this despair - for example, this is evidenced by the wonderful intonational fabric of Ladinsky's dying novel, The Last Journey of Vladimir Monomakh. This novel is a very Russian or Ukrainian case (this repatriate picked up the baton from Mark Aldanov, a resident of Kiev, and passed it on to a Kiev resident, but no longer an emigrant, Pavel Zagrebelny): a completely historical text carries not only hints of modernity, but also an impressionistic tone, sounding between words, caught on some lower level of perception (after all, we love War and Peace more for its interlinear light impression, and not for the meanings that should be found in it when studying at school).

And this tone in Ladinsky somehow gradually shows the slow acquisition of a completely religious meaning of life by the administrator-commander through his seemingly vain and sometimes unsightly deeds (and, rather, in spite of them) - and the amazing lack of acquisition of such a meaning by the incredibly sweet and sunny, brightly sincere , but still not reaching the spiritual depth of the gusliar Zlat, who embodies art-as-religion.

Finally, without this emigrant collapse of literature-religion, the late Gazdanov’s “Awakening” would not have appeared - which by the plot already directly indicates the partial acquisition of the lost meaning of life in some non-literary active way (we will not reveal the intrigue).

Such exits - and the very possibility of finding a way out - were the fruitful sprouts of the emigrant literary grain, which at one time desperately resisted contact with the earth of everyday affairs and with the earth of the Western world, was so eager to saturate the air with itself, to hang before the eyes of everyone - but did not know that, what If a grain of wheat falls into the ground and does not die, it will remain alone, but if it dies, it will bear much fruit.(John 12:24).

Thus, the emigrants were the first to go through the death of the idea of changing the world with texts - an Enlightenment idea of the 18th century, which lingered in Russia as a temptation for several centuries (and in the West, it was revived, for example, among rock musicians - and, again, ended in a senseless terrorist attack: the killer of John Lennon took revenge on the idol for the lack of cardinal changes in the world, which he expected from him and from all rock art). Those who remained in the USSR and their descendants - that is, you and I - experienced this already in the 1990-2000s - it was then that poetry, and prose, and rock and roll, and the bard song became completely “dead”: not in the sense actual disappearance, but in the sense of the loss of faith in their religious and world-changing function.

It was much easier for us to get through it. Before our eyes we already had the experience of Russian émigré writers, who were the first to carry the Russian idea of super-literature to the next world.

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