Publication year: 1921

Added: 12/31/2015

Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg (1891–1967) is one of the most popular Russian writers of the 20th century, an extremely complex and multifaceted figure. Known in his time as a poet, talented translator, subtle essayist, memoirist, the most famous publicist of the 1930s and 1940s, he was first and foremost an outstanding prose writer and author of many bestsellers. Having stood the test of time, his first book, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito, and the subsequent novel, The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov, still sound fresh and original. It is not so easy to enroll them in any particular novel rubric: lyrical satire, adventurous and picaresque novels, socio-psychological, parodic, philosophical - all these definitions will be legitimate in their own way. But one way or another, the modern reader will not be disappointed. An exciting read awaits.

The extraordinary adventures of Julio Jurenito and his disciples, Monsieur Dele, Karl Schmidt, Mr. Cool, Alexei Tishin, Ercole Bambuchi, Ilya Ehrenburg and the Negro Aisha, in the days of Peace, war and revolution, in Paris, in Mexico, in Rome, in Senegal, in Kineshma , in Moscow and elsewhere, as well as various opinions of the teacher about pipes, about death, about love, about freedom, about playing chess, about the Jewish tribe, about construction and about many other things.

Introduction

With the greatest excitement, I proceed to work, in which I see the purpose and justification of my miserable life, to describe the days and thoughts of the Teacher Julio Jurenito. Overwhelmed by the kaleidoscopic abundance of events, my memory was prematurely decrepit; malnutrition, mainly lack of sugar, also contributed to this. With fear, I think that many of the stories and judgments of the Master are forever lost to me and the world. But his image is bright and alive. He stands in front of me, thin and furious, in an orange waistcoat, in an unforgettable tie with green dots, and quietly grins. Teacher, I will not betray you!

I sometimes still write poems of average dignity out of inertia, and when asked about my profession, I shamelessly answer: "A writer." But all this applies to everyday life: in fact, I fell out of love a long time ago and left such an unproductive way of spending time. I would be very offended if anyone took this book as a novel, more or less entertaining. This would mean that I failed to complete the task given to me on the painful day of March 12, 1921, the day of Master's death. May my words be warm, like his hairy hands, living, homely, like his vest smelling of tobacco and sweat, on which little Aisha liked to cry, trembling with pain and anger, like his upper lip during tic attacks!

I call Julio Jurenito simply, almost familiarly, "Master", although he never taught anyone anything; he had no religious canons, no ethical precepts, he did not even have a simple, seedy philosophical system. I will say more: poor and great, he did not have the miserable rent of an ordinary man in the street - he was a man without convictions. I know that in comparison with him, any deputy will seem a model of perseverance of ideas, any quartermaster - the personification of honesty. Violating the prohibitions of all currently existing codes of ethics and law, Julio Jurenito did not justify this with any new religion or new worldview. Before all the courts of the world, including the revolutionary tribunal of the RSFSR and the marabout priest of Central Africa, the Teacher would appear as a traitor, a liar and an instigator of innumerable crimes. For who, if not judges, should be good dogs, protecting the order and beauty of this world?

Julio Jurenito taught to hate the present, and in order to make this hatred strong and ardent, he slightly opened before us, thrice astonished, the door leading to the great and inevitable tomorrow. Having learned about his deeds, many will say that he was only a provocateur. This is how wise philosophers and cheerful journalists called him during his lifetime. But the Teacher, without rejecting the venerable nickname, told them: “A provocateur is the great midwife of history. If you don’t accept me, a provocateur with a peaceful smile and an eternal pen in my pocket, another one will come for a caesarean section, and it will be bad for the earth.”

But contemporaries do not want, they cannot accept this righteous man without religion, a sage who did not study at the Faculty of Philosophy, an ascetic in a criminal robe. Why did Master order me to write the book of his life? For a long time I languished with doubts, looking at the honest intellectuals, whose old wisdom is aged like French cheese in the comfort of their offices with Tolstoy over the table, at these conceivable readers of my book. But the insidious memory helped me out this time. I remembered how the Teacher, pointing to the maple seed, said to me: “Yours is more correct, it flies not only in space, but also in time.” And so, not for spiritual heights, not for the now chosen, barren and doomed, I write, but for the future lower reaches, for the land not plowed by this plow, on which his children, my brothers, will tumble in blissful idiocy.

Ilya Ehrenburg, 1921

Chapter first.
My meeting with Julio Jurenito. – Devil and Dutch pipe

On March 26, 1913, I sat, as always, in the Rotonde cafe on the Boulevard Montparnasse, drinking long-drunk coffee, waiting in vain for someone to release me by paying the patient waiter six sous. A similar method of feeding was discovered by me in the winter and brilliantly justified itself. Indeed, almost always, a quarter of an hour before the closing of the cafe, some unexpected liberator appeared - a French poetess, whose poems I translated into Russian, an Argentinean sculptor, who for some reason hoped to sell his works through me to “one of the Shchukin princes”, a cheat of an unknown nationality, who won a fair amount of money from my uncle in San Sebastian and, obviously, felt pangs of conscience, finally, my old nanny, who came to Paris with the gentlemen and ended up, probably due to the distraction of a policeman who did not see the address, instead of the Russian church, which is on the street I give, in a cafe where Russian morons sat. This latter, in addition to the canonical six sous, presented me with a large roll and, touched, kissed my nose three times.

Perhaps as a result of these unexpected deliverances, or perhaps under the influence of other circumstances, such as: chronic hunger, reading books by Leon Blois and various love troubles, I was in a very mystical mood and saw some signs from above in the most miserable phenomena. Neighboring shops - colonial and green - seemed to me circles of hell, and a mustachioed baker with a high chignon, a virtuous woman of about sixty, was a shameless ephebe. I unwound in detail the invitation to Paris of three thousand inquisitors for public burning in the squares of all those who consume aperitifs. Then he drank a glass of absinthe and, drunk, recited the verses of St. Teresa, proved to the accustomed innkeeper that Nostradamus had foreseen a nursery of deadly centipedes in the Rotunda, and at midnight he knocked in vain on the cast-iron gates of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres. My days usually ended with my mistress, a Frenchwoman, with a decent experience, but a good Catholic, from whom I demanded at the most inopportune moments an explanation of how the seven “deadly” sins differ from the seven “major” ones. So little by little time passed.

On that memorable evening, I sat in a dark corner of the cafe, sober and remarkably peaceful. Next to me was puffing a fat Spaniard, completely naked, and on his knees a chestless, bony girl, also naked, but in a wide hat that covered her face, and in gilded shoes, chirped. All around, various more or less naked people were drinking mar and calvados. This spectacle, quite common for the Rotunda, was explained by a costumed evening at the "neo-Scandinavian academy." But to me, of course, all this seemed like a decisive mobilization of the army of Beelzebub, directed against me. I made various gestures, as if swimming, in order to protect myself from the sweaty Spaniard, and especially from the heavy thighs of the model pointed at me. In vain I looked in the cafe for a baker or someone who could replace her, that is, the chief marshal and the inspirer of this monstrous action.

• Forward

I asked you a question: Tell me, my friends, if you were offered to leave one word out of the whole human language, namely “yes” or “no”, abolishing the rest, which would you prefer?»

This question is from the 11th chapter of the great novel by Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891-1967) “ The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito”, in which, as it is believed, the writer predicted the Catastrophe of European Jewry long before Hitler came to power.

The question of "yes" or "no" is Julio Jurenito's test of the Jewish attitude.

Here is the chapter in its entirety:

On a wonderful April evening, we gathered again in the Parisian workshop of the Master, on the seventh floor of one of the new houses in the Grenelle quarter. For a long time we stood at the large windows, admiring our beloved city with its only, as if weightless, twilight. Schmidt was also with us, but in vain I tried to convey to him the beauty of the blue-gray houses, the stone groves of Gothic churches, the leaden reflection of the slow Seine, the chestnut trees in blossom, the first lights in the distance and the touching song of some hoarse old man under the window. He told me that all this is a wonderful museum, and he cannot stand museums since childhood, but that there is something that enchants him too, namely, the Eiffel Tower, light, slender, bending in the wind like a reed, and adamant, iron bride of others. times on the gentle blue of an April evening.

Thus, talking peacefully, we waited for the Teacher, who was having dinner with some major quartermaster. Soon he came and, having hidden a bundle of documents crumpled in his pocket in a small safe, said cheerfully to us:

“Today I did a good job. Things are going well. Now we can relax and chat a little. Only earlier, so as not to forget, I will prepare the text of the invitations, and you, Alexei Spiridonovich, will take them tomorrow to the Union printing house.

Five minutes later he showed us the following:

In the not too distant future, solemn séances for the annihilation of the Jewish tribe will take place in Budapest, Kyiv, Jaffa, Algiro and in many other places.

The program will include, in addition to the traditional pogroms beloved by the respected public, the burning of Jews restored in the spirit of the era, burying them alive in the ground, spraying the fields with Jewish blood, as well as new methods of “evacuation”, “cleansing of suspicious elements, etc., etc.

Cardinals, bishops, archimandrites, English lords, Romanian boyars, Russian liberals, French journalists, members of the Hohenzollern family, Greeks without distinction of rank, and everyone who wishes are invited. The place and time will be announced separately.

The entrance is free.

"Teacher! Alexei Spiridonovich exclaimed in horror.- It's unthinkable! Twentieth century, and such infamy! How can I take it to the Union- I, who read Merezhkovsky?

“In vain do you think that this is incompatible. Very soon, maybe in two years, maybe in five years, you will see the opposite. The twentieth century will turn out to be a very cheerful and frivolous century, without any moral prejudices, and Merezhkovsky's readers will be passionate visitors to the scheduled sessions! You see, the diseases of mankind are not childhood measles, but old hardened attacks of gout, and he has some habits in terms of treatment ... Where can we wean in old age!

When the Nile was on strike in Egypt and the drought began, the wise men remembered the existence of the Jews, invited them, cut and sprinkled the ground with fresh Jewish blood. "Let the famine pass us!" Of course, this could not replace either the rain or the flooding of the Nile, but still it gave some satisfaction. However, even then there were cautious people, of humane views, who said that it is, of course, useful to slaughter several Jews, but one should not sprinkle their blood on the ground, because this is poisonous blood and will give henbane instead of bread.

In Spain, when diseases began - the plague or the common cold,- the holy fathers recalled the "enemies of Christ and mankind" and, shedding tears, though not so plentiful as to extinguish the fires, burned several thousand Jews. "May the pestilence pass us!" Humanists, fearing fire and ashes that the wind carries everywhere, carefully, in the ear, so that some lost inquisitor would not hear, whispered: “It would be better to just kill them! ..”

In southern Italy, during earthquakes, they first ran north, then carefully, in single file, went back to see if the earth was still shaking. The Jews also ran away and also returned home, behind everyone else. Of course, the earth shook either because the Jews wanted it, or because the earth did not want the Jews. In both cases, it was useful to bury individual representatives of this tribe alive, which was done. What did the advanced people say?.. Oh, yes, they were very afraid that the buried ones would finally shake the earth.

Here, my friends, is a brief digression into history. And since humanity will face both famine and pestilence, and a quite decent earthquake, I am only showing understandable forethought by printing these invitations.

"Teacher, - objected Alexei Spiridonovich,- Aren't Jews the same people as we are?

(While Jurenito was making his "excursion," Tishin sighed lingeringly, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, but just in case, he sat away from me.)

"Of course not! Are a soccer ball and a bomb the same thing? Or do you think a tree and an ax can be brothers? You can love or hate Jews, look at them with horror, as arsonists, or with hope, as saviors, but their blood is not yours and their cause is not yours. Do not understand? Don't you want to believe? Okay, I'll try to explain it better to you.

The evening is quiet, not hot, with a glass of this light vouvray I will entertain you with childish play. Tell me, my friends, if you were asked to leave one word out of all human language, namely "yes" or "no", abolishing the rest,- which would you prefer? Let's start with the elders. Are you Mr Cool?"

“Of course yes, it is an affirmation. I don't like no, it's immoral and criminal, Even to the calculated worker who begs me to take him again, I never say that hardening no, but "my friend, wait a little, in the next world you will be rewarded for torment “. When I show dollars, everyone says “yes” to me. Destroy all the words but keep the dollars and the little yes- and I undertake to improve the health of mankind!

“In my opinion, both“ yes ”and“ no ”are extremes,said Monsieur Delais,- and I love everything in moderation, something in between. But what if you have to choose, then I say yes! “Yes” is a joy, an impulse, what else? .. Everything! Madam, your poor husband has passed away. Fourth grade, right? Yes! Waiter, a glass of dubonnet! Yes! Zizi, are you ready? Yes Yes!"

Aleksey Spiridonovich, still shaken by the previous one, could not collect his thoughts, mumbled, jumped up, sat down, and finally yelled:

"Yes! I believe, Lord! Communion! "Yes"! The sacred "yes" of a pure Turgenev girl! Oh Lisa! Come on, dove!”

Briefly and to the point, finding this whole game ridiculous, Schmidt said that the dictionary really needed to be revised, throwing out a number of unnecessary archaisms, such as: “rose”, “shrine”, “angel” and others, “no” and “yes” must be left as serious words, but still, if he had to choose, he would prefer "yes", as something organizing.

"Yes! Si! Ercole replied.- in all the pleasant cases of life they say "yes", and only when they are driven in the neck, they shout "no"!

Aisha also preferred “yes!”. When he asks Krupto (the new god) to be kind, Krupto says yes! When he asks Master for two sous for chocolate, Master says yes and gives.

"Why are you silent?" the Teacher asked me. I didn't answer earlier, afraid to annoy him and my friends. "Master, I won't lie to you - I would leave no. You see, frankly, I really like it when something fails, I love Mr. Cool, but I would be pleased if he suddenly lost his dollars, so simply lost everything like a button. Or if Monsieur Dale's clients had mixed up the classes. The one in the sixteenth grade for three years would have risen from the coffin and would have shouted: “Take out the scented handkerchiefs - I want to go outside the classes!” resolute vagabond,- good too. And when the waiter slips and drops a bottle of dubonnet, very good! Of course, as my great-great-great-grandfather, clever Solomon, said: “A time to collect stones and a time to throw them.” But I am a simple person, I have one face, not two. Someone will probably have to assemble it, maybe Schmidt. In the meantime, I, not at all out of originality, but in good conscience, must say: “Destroy the yes, destroy everything in the world, and then by itself there will be only one no!”

While I was talking, all the friends who were sitting next to me on the sofa moved to another corner. I was left alone. The teacher turned to Alexei Spiridonovich:

“Now you see that I was right. There was a natural division. Our Jew was left alone. You can destroy the entire ghetto, erase all the "Pale of Settlement", tear down all the borders, but nothing can fill the five arshins that separate you from it. We are all Robinsons, or, if you like, convicts, the rest is a matter of character. Odin tames a spider, practices Sanskrit, and lovingly sweeps the cell floor. Another hits the wall with his head - a bump, again bang,- again a bump, and so on; What is stronger - the head or the wall?The Greeks came, maybe they looked around, there are even better apartments, without illness, without death, without flour, for example, Olympus. But there's nothing to be done - it is necessary to settle in this one. And to be in a good mood, it is best to declare various inconveniences - including death (which you can’t change anyway) - as the greatest blessings. The Jews came - and immediately bang into the wall! “Why is it like this? Here are two people, to be equal to them, So no: Jacob is in favor, and Esau is in the backyard. Undermining of earth and sky, Jehovah and kings, Babylon and Rome begins. The ragamuffins sleeping on the steps of the temple,- the Essenes are working: like explosives in cauldrons, they are kneading a new religion of justice and poverty. Now indestructible Rome will fly! And against the magnificence, against the wisdom of the ancient world, the poor, ignorant, stupid sectarians come out. Shivering Rome. The Jew Paul defeated Marcus Aurelius! But ordinary people, who prefer a cozy house to dynamite, begin to settle in a new faith, to settle down in this bare hut in a good, homely way. Christianity is no longer a wall-beating machine, but a new fortress; terrible, bare, destructive justice is replaced by human, comfortable, gutta-percha mercy. Rome and the world endured. But, seeing this, the Jewish tribe renounced their cub and began to dig again. Even, somewhere in Melbourne, now he sits alone and quietly digs into his thoughts. And again something is kneaded in cauldrons, and again they prepare a new faith, a new truth. And now, forty years ago, the gardens of Versailles are pierced by the first bouts of fever, just like the gardens of Hadrian. And Rome boasts of wisdom, the books of Seneca are written, brave cohorts are ready. It trembles again, "invincible Rome"!

The Jews were carrying a new baby. You will see his wild eyes, red hair and arms as strong as steel. Having given birth, the Jews are ready to die. Heroic gesture - "there are no more nations, no more of us, but all of us!" Oh, naive, incorrigible sectarians! Your child will be taken, washed, dressed - and he will be just like Schmidt. Again they will say - "justice", but they will replace it with expediency. And will you leave again to hate and wait, break the wall and moan "how long"?

I will answer - to the days of your and our madness, to the days of infancy, to distant days. In the meantime, this tribe will bleed women in labor on the squares of Europe, giving birth to another child who will betray him.

But how can I not love this spade in a thousand-year-old hand? They dig graves for them, but don't they dig up the field for them? Jewish blood will be shed, invited guests will applaud, but according to ancient whispers, it will poison the earth more bitterly. The Great Medicine of the World!

And coming up to me, the Teacher kissed me on the forehead.

"The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito" (listen(inf.)) is a novel by the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, published in 1922 and now considered one of his best books. It came out with a preface by Bukharin, had extraordinary success in the 1920s, was withdrawn and placed in a special depository in subsequent years, was not reprinted until the 1960s.

Plot

The novel is written in the first person; Ilya Ehrenburg made himself the narrator, a poor Russian emigrant in Paris on March 26, 1913, on the eve of the First World War. Sitting in the Rotunda cafe on Montparnasse Boulevard, he meets a demonic personality - Julio Jurenito, who takes him as a student, then acquires new followers, engages in mysterious and fraudulent activities, travels around Europe and Africa, and eventually ends up in revolutionary Russia, where on March 12, 1921 he dies in Konotop, having bequeathed to Ehrenburg to write his biography.

Characters

• Julio Jurenito- "Teacher"

• His students:

1. Ilya Erenburg, a Russian Jew, a devoted, enthusiastic and somewhat naive follower
2. Mister Cool, an American entrepreneur who believes in the dollar and the Bible
3. Aisha, Senegalese Negro, fight in the Paris hotel "Majestic"
4. Alexey Spiridonovich Tishin, Russian intellectual, originally from Yelets, reads Vladimir Solovyov
5. Ercole Bamboo, italian slacker
6. Monsieur Dale, French entrepreneur, undertaker
7. Carl Schmidt, German student

These characters appear in other works of the writer - Mr. Cool appears in the Trust D. E., Monsieur Delay - in Thirteen Pipes.

prototypes

Predictions

• Mass extermination of Jews:

In the near future, solemn séances for the destruction of the Jewish tribe will take place in Budapest, Kyiv, Jaffa, Algiers and in many other places. The program will include, in addition to the traditional pogroms beloved by the respected public, also restoration in the spirit of the era: burning the Jews, burying them alive in the ground, spraying the fields with Jewish blood and new techniques, such as: “evacuation”, “cleansing from suspicious elements”, etc. , etc. The place and time will be announced separately. The entrance is free.

• Nuclear weapons in Japan:

He placed all his hopes on the known effects of rays and on radium. (...) One day Teacher came out to me cheerful and lively; despite all the difficulties, he found a means that will greatly facilitate and accelerate the destruction of mankind. (...) I know that he made the apparatus and left it for Mr Cool to keep. When a year later he finally wanted to use them, Mr. Cool began to delay the matter in every possible way, assuring that he had taken the devices to America, and no one could be instructed to bring them and so on. I assumed that Mr. Cool was guided by considerations of a financial nature, but he once admitted that the Germans could be finished off with French bayonets, and Jurenito's tricks were better left for the future for the Japanese. Subsequently, circumstances developed in such a way that the Master never mentioned this invention, but in any case - I know this for sure - the apparatus and explanatory notes are now in the hands of Mr. Cool.

• German attitude towards the occupied lands:

We shall soon have, for strategic reasons, to clear out a fairly large piece of Picardy; it is possible that we will not return there, and it is already obvious that we will not join it. Therefore, I am preparing the correct destruction of this area. A very painstaking task. It is necessary to study all the trades: in Ama, a soap factory - to blow it up; Shawnee is famous for pears - cut down trees; near Saint-Quentenay there are excellent dairy farms - the cattle should be transferred to us, and so on. We will leave bare ground. If it could be done as far as Marseille and the Pyrenees, I would be happy...

History of writing and stylistic characteristics

As Ehrenburg writes in his memoirs, he had the idea for the novel when he was in revolutionary Kyiv. He wrote the book in the shortest possible time in the Belgian resort of De Panne.

The book consists of a preface and 35 chapters. The first 11 chapters are a collection of students and the Teacher's discussions on various topics, the next 11 are their fates during the World War, then another 11 chapters are devoted to their fates in revolutionary Russia. The penultimate chapter is about the death of the Master; and the latter performs the function of an afterword.

The novel is a kind of parody of the Gospels: Jurenito is bred as a Teacher, his followers become like apostles; his birthday is indicated - this is the feast of the Annunciation, his last name, like the nickname of Christ, begins with the letter "X", he dies at 33, putting his head under the bullets himself, Ehrenburg flees in horror in this scene, and then compares himself with the forsaken Peter. The presentation of the topic by the author contributes to the impression - with reverence for Jurenito, interrupting events with parables.

In addition, elements of the Baroque style are noted (for example, a long title); as well as the clear influence of the picaresque novel.

Perception

Links

Bibliography

• Sergei Zemlyanoy. “Revolution and provocation. About Ilya Ehrenburg's novel Julio Jurenito.
• Kantor, Vladimir Karlovich. Metaphysics of the Jewish "no" in Ilya Ehrenburg's novel "Julio Hurenito" / Russian-Jewish Culture / Intern. research center of growth and Eastern European Jews; ed. O. V. Budnitsky (editor-in-chief), O. V. Belova, V. V. Mochalova. - M. : ROSSPEN, 2006. - 495 p. : l. col. ill. ; 22 cm - Tit. l., ref. parallel in English. lang. - Decree. names: 484-492. - Bibliography. in note. at the end of Art. - 1000 copies. - ISBN 5-8243-0806-3 (in translation)
• D.D. Nikolaev. Woland vs. Julio Hurenito // Bulletin of Moscow State University. Philology. - 2006. - No. 5.

This picaresque novel, full of bitter and cynical reflections on the modern world order, has often been compared to Voltaire's Candide and Yaroslav Hasek's Schweik. Who is Julio Jurenito? Allegedly a native of Mexico (a tribute to his friendship with Diego Rivera), he once appears in the Parisian "Rotonde" to recruit students for himself, of which the poet Ilya Ehrenburg turns out to be the most brilliant. Although a long tail peeks out from under Julio Jurenito's coat, he is nevertheless not the devil (after all, the existence of the devil implies the existence of God), but the Great Provocateur. Julio Jurenito is a man without convictions, determined to undermine all the notions on which bourgeois society is based. This Teacher does not preach anything, his job is to pervert, turn against her all the principles of the civilization he hates: “... after lengthy deliberation, he decided<…>that culture is evil. It is necessary not to attack her, but in every possible way to treat the ulcers that are spreading and ready to devour her half-rotten body. The Great Provocateur proves that behind the sacred European values, such as love, religion, work, art, only the omnipotent power of money is hidden. However, the general tone of "Julio Jurenito" is far from the accusatory pathos of Ehrenburg's previous works: of course, the Teacher is plunged into deep despair, but there are no tirades in the spirit of Leon Blois in the novel. Has the experience of the two wars recently experienced by Ehrenburg humbled his anarchist fervor? One way or another, after his trials, he came to the conclusion that he was not the only one who had the desire to “destroy the house”, blow up this worthless world where he had to live (it is precisely this desire that the autobiographical character of the novel named Ilya Ehrenburg admits in a conversation with Julio Jurenito ), and that those who wear military uniforms will cope best with this task: “A provocateur is the great midwife of history. If you don’t accept me, a provocateur with a peaceful smile and an eternal pen in my pocket, another one will come for a caesarean section, and it will be bad on earth.”

It should be noted that Ehrenburg's European experience (which at that time was not something exceptional) by no means made him a humanist and cosmopolitan: on the contrary, the modern world appears to him as a continuous struggle, an absurd and cruel confrontation of both individuals and entire nations. And now seven students gather around Julio Jurenito, ready to follow the Teacher: they all come from different countries and embody the most stereotyped stereotypes: the Italian is lazy, the American despises culture and thinks only about money, the Frenchman is a gourmet and hedonist, the German is committed to order and discipline , a Senegalese, a favorite student of Jurenito, is a kind and naive "noble savage", a Russian is an enthusiastic intellectual, incapable of action, and, finally, the seventh is a Jew, Ilya Ehrenburg, just a smart person. Of course, it is this last character that is of interest to us: it is the alter ego of the author, his self-portrait, or, more precisely, his mirror image.

One day, Julio Jurenito, aka the Great Provocateur, presents his students with a grandiose plan, truly on the scale of the “projects” of the 20th century: he intends to arrange “ceremonial sessions for the destruction of the Jewish tribe” in various large cities of the world: “The program will include, in addition to the traditional pogroms, restored in the spirit of the era: burning Jews, burying them alive in the ground, spraying the fields with Jewish blood, as well as new methods of “evacuation”, “cleansing of suspicious elements”, etc., etc.” To foresee such spectacles in 1921 is already quite a lot! The students got excited. Alexey Spiridonovich Tishin, Russian, is shocked: “This is unthinkable! Twentieth century, and such infamy!<…>Aren't the Jews just like us?" To which the Master resolutely objects: “Are the soccer ball and the bomb the same thing? Or do you think a tree and an ax can be brothers? You can love or hate Jews, look at them with horror, as arsonists, or with hope, as saviors, but their blood is not yours, and their cause is not yours! And he invites the students to conduct a small experiment - to make a choice between the words "yes" and "no". Everyone chooses "yes", except for Ilya Ehrenburg: he is the only one who prefers "no". While he justifies his choice, the friends who were sitting next to him are transplanted further away, to another corner. The experience turns out to be convincing: it is denial and skepticism that constitute the quintessence of the Jewish mind, dooming it to inescapable loneliness and eternal searches. The fate of the Jewish people does not fit within the framework of state regimes and public organizations: “You can destroy the entire ghetto, erase all the Pale of Settlement, tear down all borders, but nothing can fill these five arshins separating you from it,” the Great Provocateur concludes. Twice the Jews brought to mankind the message of universal justice and universal brotherhood: first they gave the world Christianity, then the idea of ​​proletarian internationalism. And both times a beautiful dream was perverted and trampled. Jewish pogroms are not only a symptom of the evil that is corroding civilization, but also proof of the redemptive mission of Jewry.

The teacher and students travel the world and eventually arrive in revolutionary Russia. Here Ehrenburg collected all his impressions of the civil war, when he alternately joined the Whites, then the Reds, and ironically rethought his own articles of the Kyiv period. To put their confused thoughts in order, Ilya Ehrenburg and Julio Jurenito go on a visit to the leader of the revolution. This chapter is called "The Grand Inquisitor Beyond the Legend": it refers the reader to Dostoevsky and the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" told by Ivan Karamazov, which poses the problem of choosing between happiness and freedom. In the post-war Soviet editions of Julio Jurenito, this chapter will be completely censored (at that time Dostoevsky was declared a reactionary writer in the USSR). Meanwhile, it is much less vulnerable than other pages of the novel devoted to Soviet Russia. It depicts a man “with intelligent and mocking eyes”, calm and tolerant, who loses his peace of mind only when the Teacher mentions the list of those who were shot published in Izvestia, and then the reader suddenly discovers the full depth of his torment. He confesses that he would like someone else to take on the burden of revolutionary duty. After all, if the revolution is not led, it will choke in anarchy: “Here is heaviness, here is flour! Of course, the historical process, inevitability and so on. But someone had to know, start, become the head. Two years ago they walked with stakes, roared roaring, tore the generals to shreds ... The sea was turbid, rampant.<…>Come! Who? I, tens, thousands, organization, party, power<…>I won’t wallow under images, atone for sins, I won’t wash my hands. I'm just saying it's hard. But it’s necessary, you hear, otherwise it’s impossible! Leaving the Kremlin, Julio Jurenito imprints a ritual kiss on the forehead of the leader, following the example of the hero of Dostoevsky.

The meeting with the workers of the Cheka gives Julio Jurenito the opportunity to express his views on revolutionary art. He intends to congratulate them on the fact that they have managed to completely destroy, along with other bourgeois values, the very concept of freedom. He conjures them not to turn off this path, not to give up: “I beg you, do not decorate sticks with violets! Great and complex is your mission to accustom a person to the stocks so that they seem to him like the gentle embrace of his mother. No, we need to create a new pathos for a new slavery.<…>Leave freedom to the syphilitic pubs of Montmartre, and do everything without it that you, in fact, are already doing!” However, these calls are perceived as a provocation. Revolutionary Russia disappointed the Teacher: “The state is like a state,” he concludes pessimistically, and, seized by deadly boredom, decides to voluntarily die.

Julio Jurenito allows himself to be killed by bandits who are seduced by his boots. Ehrenburg even indicates the exact date of the crime - March 12, 1921: it was on this day that he and Lyuba crossed the border of Soviet Russia. The teacher dies, and with him the idea of ​​revolution as unlimited freedom dies, but his student continues to live. Belgium is only an occasional haven for him, he does not want to stay there for a long time. Of course, he dreams of returning to Paris, but an article about revolutionary poetry published in a French-Belgian magazine gives the French authorities another reason to refuse him a visa. Ehrenburg is angry: do the French really believe that the "poet Ehrenburg" left his country to "sing of aperitifs and Ford cars"? The endured humiliation forces him to make a response remark. He will not allow himself to be treated the same as other expatriates, to be mistaken for a man without a homeland. In a new cycle of poems, "Foreign Reflections", written in Belgium, not without comedy, he exclaims:

Oh, woe, woe to those who escaped from hard labor!

They are beckoned by the newly abandoned ice.

And who, in the midst of the equinox of the equator,

Will not remember the sacred gruel?

He sings of the Promethean impulse of his Motherland, which, hungry and undressed, nevertheless dreams of the magical fairy of Electricity, ready to descend to her land:

There was wood and bread, tobacco and cotton,

But water washed away the mainland.

And now, having set sail, half of Europe

Floating to no one knows where.

Didn't you want from heaven

To reduce the promised fire,

So that after a loaf of bread

Stretch your trembling hand?<…>

There in the offices, giant schemes,

Circles and rhombuses triumph,

And on the rotting stations

Dumb, timid "FAQ?".

funny electrifications

St. Elmo lights.

Oh who dares to laugh

Over the blindness of such anguish?

In well-fed Europe, the "avenues of thirty capitals" "laugh at the foolishness" of the impoverished dreamer of Russia. But the poet is not sold to scoffers, he remains true to his "birthright". Such a sudden bitterness against the West, such a pathetic oath of allegiance to Russia, contradicts the path he has chosen as a fugitive who has left the “icy penal servitude”. "Ehrenburg is an interesting and rare case of an accuser who adores what he opposes," wrote one of his friends about him.

At least he took a small revenge and avenged his deportation from France. During his brief stay in Paris, he managed to read the new work of Blaise Cendrars "The End of the World, told by the angel of Notre Dame", "a satire, under the guise of a movie script, depicting the end of the capitalist world." The edition was superbly illustrated by Fernand Léger. After four years of cultural isolation, acquaintance with this work re-discovers contemporary art for Ehrenburg. Cendrars' book will become for him a real fount of ideas, from which he will soon shamelessly scoop, discarding any scrupulousness. Two years later, the "cinematic novel" D.E. The history of the death of Europe "Ehrenburg. According to the Greek myth, the beautiful but weak Europe is kidnapped by the monstrous Minotaur - the United States of America; we will find this theme and technique in his 1929 book The United Front.

So, Ehrenburg is offended and annoyed. Since the way to France is closed, he is forced to go to Germany. But if in Paris he is at home and feels like a real Parisian, then in Berlin he does not stand out among the Russian colony: the same emigrant as the others. It disgusts him. He understands what an abyss separates those who today reject both the new government and the new society that has emerged in the country from those who, not being a communist, nevertheless consider themselves participants in the revival of Russia. Ehrenburg foresees that Berlin will not be without misunderstandings. As soon as he arrived in the capital of Germany, he wrote to his friend Maria Shkapskaya in Russia: “It is possible that by April we will be at home. After all, life is yours, not here.” Strange plans for an emigrant, isn't it?