Dymov Osip

D ymov, Osip - the pseudonym of the writer Osip Isidorovich Perelman. Born in 1878 to a Jewish family. He graduated from the course at the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute. IN short period reproduction of satirical magazines after October 17 big success had Dymov's jokes in Signals. In 1905 he published a collection of symbolic stories, The Solstice (2nd edition, 1908). The scope of Dymov's observations is not extensive; he is inspired not so much by life as by a book; His outlook is also not wide, but he brings subtlety and elegance to the development of his themes. He is best at parody. Dependence on other writers noticeably affected the stories collected in "Solstice": in general, these are rehashes of Maeterlinck and other modernists, and partly -. The obvious inspiration was reflected in the extreme artificiality and tension of motives. Dymov failed to write symbolic plays("voice of blood"). Dymov's play "Nu" (1908) was a success in Russia and Germany, and partly also his plays on Jewish themes: "Listen, Israel" (1908) and "The Eternal Wanderer" (1912). In addition to "The Solstice", Dymov's novels and stories are collected in the books: "The Earth Blooms" (1908), "Stories", book I (1910), "Merry Sadness" (1911).

Writer; see Perelman.

(Brockhaus)

Dymov, Osip

(Perelman, Osip Isidorovich) is a popular Russian novelist; genus. in 1878 in Bialystok, completed a course at the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute. Starting his literary work in small newspapers, he soon came to the fore with his witty feuilletons and jokes in the period after October 17, 1905, during the growth of satirical magazines. In 1905 he published a collection of stories "Solstice"; after that, his play "Voice of Blood" came out. Starting from 1906-07. Dymov takes a permanent part as a feuilletonist in the newspapers: "Free Thoughts", "Morning", etc., also in the newspaper "Rus", often speaking under the second pseudonym - "Cain". In 1908, the second collection of his stories, The Earth Blooms, was published, which was less favorably received by critics than the first. Around the same time, he wrote the drama "Every Day", which went to German translation in Germany, and then staged in St. Petersburg under the name "Nu". - in Heb. D. topics are written short story"Pogrom" and the drama "Listen, Israel!" dedicated to the same theme, first staged in one of the St. Petersburg theaters in 1907; this drama, although it produces a certain impression, was not particularly successful. - Graceful and witty, sometimes somewhat pretentious, D. gives his stories a symbolic connotation, which is especially noticeable in his first works. Best of all, he is given small stories, miniatures, subtly conveying moods. - Wed. Brokg.-Efron (additional volume, under the lines of Perelman).

(Heb. enc.)

Dymov, Osip

(pseudo-Perelman Osip Isidorovich), Izv. novelist and playwright, b. 1878 in Bialystok, according to spec. image. arborist.

(Vengerov)

Dymov, Osip

(pseudonym of Osip Isidorovich Perelman) - novelist and playwright. D. advanced as a humorist-feuilletonist (pseudonym "Cain"). In the stories of D., impressionistic miniatures, there are fragmentary episodes, unfinished words and phrases, flashing bizarre moods, shreds of experiences. characteristic item images of D. - flirting capital zhuyers of both sexes, refined (mainly love) experiences of a satiated bourgeois, his capricious and painful feelings. Banal pantheistic reasoning, cheap skepticism, fashionable "mystical haze", mysterious allusions to unearthly voices, in the absence of genuine symbolist mysticism - all this makes up the meager ideological load of D.'s stories. riz". His stories are written in a "musical" language, with an abundance of unexpected comparisons, spectacular verbal combinations, densely saturated with imagery, colorful descriptions. However, the impressionistic sophistication of his style often turns into pretentiousness, mannerisms. Drama D. - household paintings, interspersed with pretentious reasoning, or melodramatic scenes with abstract characters (attempts at decadence). D. in the 1910s. enjoyed wide popularity among the bourgeois-petty-bourgeois reader. After the October Revolution, D. emigrated.

Bibliography: I. Solstice, St. Petersburg, 1905; Voice of Blood, Drama, magazine. "Theatre and Art", 1905; Commonwealth, St. Petersburg, 1908; The earth blooms, St. Petersburg, 1908; Listen, Israel! Drama, St. Petersburg, 1903; Nu. The tragedy of every day, St. Petersburg, 1908; Stories, St. Petersburg, 1910, book. 1; Merry sadness, Humorous stories, St. Petersburg, 1911; The vexation of the spirit, Roman, alm. "Rosehip", 1912, book. 17; Eternal Wanderer, Drama, St. Petersburg, 1913; Crime of a girl, M., 1917, etc. Autobiographical information cm. Fidler F. F., First Literary Steps, Moscow, 1911.

II. Reviews: Petrovskaya N., in Sat. "Pass", 1907, No. 4, and in "Demons", 1908, No. 1; Chukovsky K., From Chekhov to our days, St. Petersburg, 1908; Gershenzon M., in "Critical Review", 1908, No. 1; Hoffman V., in "Russian Thought", 1908, No. 4; Kranichfeld, in " Modern world", 1912, No. 4 (about the collection "The Earth Blooms").

(Lit. Enz.)

D s mov, Osip

(Joseph Isidorovich Perelman). Genus. 1878, mind. 1959. Writer, playwright, journalist. Author of stories (including humorous ones), short stories, novels, plays. Works: "The Solstice" (collection, 1905), "Vlas" (1909), "The Anguish of the Spirit" (novel, 1912) and others. Since 1913 in the USA. Brother Ya. I. Perelman (see).

Osip Dymov

The extremely indistinct and containing a desperate amount of contradictions, the concept of "Russian-Jewish literature" exists, is in use, and it is unlikely that it could be supplanted and replaced by any other, more successful term. Perhaps the most subtle connoisseur of this definition, the late Shimon Markish, once proposed to strengthen it with theoretical props (see his article “Russian-Jewish Literature: Subject, Approaches, Evaluations”, UFO, 1995, No. 15), but initiative successors of the ideas of the scientist was not found, and they, these ideas, as it seems, did not master the masses. The "longing for theory" nevertheless remained, and it becomes sharper and sharper as the complexity of Russian-Jewish cultural phenomena increases. In particular, the phenomena are adjacent, borderline, the content of which is “dark and incomprehensible”, like “the history of the Medes”, according to the classical expression of the Russian historian. One such phenomenon is the work of Osip Dymov (1878–1959), a Russian writer with Jewish blood. Osip Isidorovich Perelman (his real name before the adoption of the Chekhov pseudonym) seems to have been specially born to prove the weakness and limitation of explicit resources for Russian-Jewish cultural interactions and inversions. Behaving rather inconsistently from the point of view of a schematic representation of Russian and Jewish, he, having achieved at the beginning of the 20th century, if not fame, but at least wide fame and popularity as a Russian writer - prose writer and playwright, made unexpected rolls from the "universal" towards the native. So, according to the memoirs of K. Chukovsky, who knew him closely, Dymov had a hard time with the Bialystok pogrom, in which he lost a person close to him (the writer was from Bialystok).

However, he wrote his terrible story “Pogrom” before the famous Bialystok pogrom that took place in early June 1906. "Pogrom" was published in the first Dymov collection of prose "Solstice", which was published in 1905 and went through three editions: in the same year - repeated and the third - in 1913. The Bialystok pogrom could, perhaps, be reflected in the play “Listen, Israel!” (1907), with which Dymov, a Jewish playwright, begins, is a line in his work, which became, a few years later, when he moved to America in 1913, not a side, but a main line.

In America, Dymov almost completely switched to Yiddish, wrote hundreds of texts - novels, short stories, plays, scattered throughout numerous Yiddish publications around the world - from Poland to America, so not only to describe them, but even simply to collect and list them seems to be a daunting task. Just as Dymov did not become the “Jewish Chekhov” in St. Petersburg, so in New York he did not turn into the “Jewish Maeterlinck” or “Jewish Ibsen”, nevertheless he entered the history of both theaters - Russian and American-Jewish - as a phenomenon V the highest degree bright and visible. Dymov became his own man in world cinema - German, English, American, several dozen films were staged according to his scripts. I will limit myself to mentioning only a few: together with A. Lanz and K. Linz, the script for the German film Rasputin, Damon der Frauen (1930; dir. A. Trotz; leading role it was played by the famous German actor Konrad Veit, who once played in the film "Nu" based on the play by Dymov); for the American film "Sins of Man" (1936; dir. O. Brouwer and G. Ratov); for the film by E. J. Ulmer "The Singing Blacksmith" (1938) - based on the play by D. Pinsky "Yankel der Schmidt" (1909); together with I. Berne, the director of the film, he wrote the script for Mirela Efros (1939) - based on one of the most famous plays by the largest Jewish playwright Y. Gordin; script for the film shot by M. Nossek "Overture to Glory" - based on the play by M. Anstein and others.

Dymov won fame as a publicist and memoirist: in 1943-1944, his two-volume memoirs Vos ikh Gedenk (What I Remember) were published in Yiddish. A good painter since childhood, in the 1950s he became interested in sculpture and also achieved significant success in this area: he exhibited and had sympathetic criticism. A very special area among the many talents of this man is the gift of a clairvoyant, graphologist and psychic, which he himself spoke about, which was confirmed by people who knew him and which would need to be discussed especially, especially in connection with the mystical notes that now and then sound in Dymov's texts.

Dymov's story, offered to the reader's attention, was written in the early years of his American immigration. However, strictly speaking, there was no real emigration. The well-known Jewish entrepreneur, director and actor Boruch Tomashevsky (1866–1939), who toured Europe in 1913, suggested that Dymov stage his play The Eternal Wanderer in his New York theater. Dymov agreed and in September - early October 1913 went to the New World - thus began his second, longer life as an American Jewish playwright and prose writer.

To be sure, his departure to the United States did not look like an ordinary refugee, and, apparently, he initially did not intend to stay there forever. He continued to publish in the popular Birzhevye Vedomosti newspaper, where he had previously been a permanent contributor. Here he sent several of his new stories and essays, written already in America. The story “Voice of War”, published in this newspaper (1916. No. 15503. April 17, p. 2), is one of those works by Dymov that were written in Russian, still, as it were, by a Russian writer, but already in a new biographical context and in a certain sense, on the transition to a new status of a purely Jewish writer.

Osip Dymov and actor Ludwig Sats.

USA. 1920s.

Thematically, the story is connected with the First World War, to which Dymov, who lives far from the theater of operations in America, actively reacted as a publicist - at that time he was a prolific author of the New York Russian-language newspaper Russkoe Slovo (later New Russian word”), the oldest in exile, published from 1910 to the present day. The First World War was reflected in his play The World on Fire (1917), which became Dymov's debut as a Yiddish playwright. The play was staged at New York's Jewish Grand Theater directed by the outstanding actor and director Yakov Adler (1855–1926), who played the title role of Dr. Iserlis in the play. " Great War”, as it was then called, was comprehended in this play as greatest tragedy of the Jewish people, standing in the same historical row with a series of its other national dramas and disasters - Roman rule, the fires of the Spanish Inquisition, etc. The Jews of the western outskirts of Russia, including Dymov's native Bialystok, did not just find themselves between a rock and a hard place - between the German and Russian armies - and fully drank the bitterness of the suffering of the civilian population, caught in a military meat grinder. They were accused by the Russian authorities of espionage and evicted en masse from the territories adjacent to the theater of operations.

In the story “Voice of War”, an unexpected geographical perspective is chosen: the action takes place not in Europe, but on the Turkish front, and it is not about an Ashkenazi youth - which would be understandable and understandable for Dymov, but about an unfortunate Eastern Jew, the son of a timber and flax merchant, up on a tree by the Turkish gendarmes on exactly the same suspicion of espionage, according to which, on the opposite side, in the Russian army, at the first slander, without trial or investigation, his co-religionists were hanged. The truly blind hatred towards the Jews and the attitude towards them as potential spies and traitors has no geographical boundaries. Dymov, no doubt, took into account that by moving the scene of the story from the center to the periphery of the war, he thereby enhances its artistic effect. European topoi, which have become familiar in an endless number of newspaper repetitions, receive, as it were, an unexpected illumination from the depths. As an experienced storyteller, he, moreover, correctly calculated that the Jewish theme, penetrating the spirit and flesh of the narrative, remains, however, half-hidden, not named from the external, formal side. Dymov stubbornly avoids the very words "Jew", "Jewish", "Jewishness": he does not use them either where he is talking about a hanged Jewish youth, or where a procession of Jews along the roads of war is described. Instead, only the expressive euphemical paraphrase "people-stepchildren" is used, according to which it is difficult not to guess who they are talking about. All this enhances the poetic power and emotional impact of Dymov's story.

Vladimir Khazan

Osip Dymov (far right), next to him is the writer L. Andreev, the singer L.V. Sobinov. 1905

The Turkish front retreated from the border south into the interior of the country. The population fled with the troops. Trains were leaving, crowded with old people, women and children. Several mothers lost their children in the confusion and stampede. They fled, without tying things, in summer dresses, taking with them a little bread and milk for the children.

Then, from the surrounding villages, villages and towns, people pulled in carts, carts, chaises. The exhausted horses moved forward with difficulty. Cows mooed, hungry dogs barked, children screamed.

And when the last train rushed off far to the south, squealing as it climbed the bridge, as if crying out in pain, when the last miserable carts with pillows piled on them and various rubbish passed by, when the last agonizing cry of a hungry child resounded in the distance, silence fell. Evening descended and a pink silent glow became soft velvet in the north. The cities were on fire.

In the place where people lived and worked for many hundreds of years, a desert was now born. People disappeared, cities burned down, roads were destroyed. The desert was inhabited only by hungry dogs, which quickly ran wild. In a few days they became like their ancestors - the wolves who lived here thousands of years ago.

And this desert breathed. She breathed iron sighs heavily and resonantly, so that the air shuddered. From the veil of pink velvet, which embraced half the sky, came those heavy deathly sighs of steel cannons.

Darkness deepened, a light rain fell, and in the distance, at the turn of the road, which was mixed with the wheels of guns, the steps of soldiers and the hooves of animals, strange creatures, an incomprehensible procession, appeared at the turn of the muddy road. From a distance it was still impossible to determine what it was: animals or people? Like mystical ghosts of war they were born in the glow of cities and in the rumble of distant guns. They walked, trampling the washed-out autumn road with their feet...

Here they are closer ... You can already consider them. One can distinguish their language and guttural dialect, in which the ear hears the very words that were heard hundreds and thousands of years ago, when the ancestors of these people wandered along deserted roads on the same terrible nights and the red glow of fires was behind them.

These were stepson people, people who lived with the indigenous population for many years and are now thrown out of their nests. They marched in a crowd, driven by the invisible scourge of war. They walked hungry, dirty, sick, along washed-out roads, through deserted fields. The wind whistled over them, the cold night breathed.

Crows hovered low over their heads, which became very numerous these days: they multiplied on fresh human meat.

These stepson people were the last to walk the roads. Nobody else passed. It became deserted and quiet. The rain continued and the road was flooded. The usual night train did not arrive from the east. The bridge had been blown up, and its metal skeleton was sticking out of the water in broken pieces. In the abandoned city, the blackened, crumbling chimneys of burned-out factories protruded from the ruins, like giant tentacles of the looming desert.

That night, when the last inhabitants of the small town left their homes, the Turkish peasant Mukhmet stayed behind. He was a small, crippled by life and hard work man of about twenty-four. His father and two brothers left in a cart while it was still light. They harnessed the last horse and took with them the last measure of potatoes...

Mukhmet stayed. He saw the last carriage disappear from his eyes. He heard how, praying, lamenting and crying, the local stepchildren gathered on their way. The old lumber and flax merchant, the same one whose son was hanged yesterday morning by the Turkish gendarmes, stood helplessly on the porch of his house and walked away without looking back. His gray head was shaking from grief or from hunger - Mukhmet could not know this. But he knew that the old man went to the officer several times during the day and asked him to give him the body of his hanged son for burial. But the officer drove the old man away. So the body is left to hang on big tree, which grew up near the old barracks.

“Why did they hang the old man’s son? thought the young man. - The gendarmes said - because he was a traitor. It was hard to believe, but the gendarmes probably know better. Mukhmet grew up with the son of a merchant, they played together as children, sometimes they did things together. The old merchant often sent his son abroad, which was close, on trade business. There he received orders for flax and wood. These orders were recorded in his books; The gendarmes found these books, did not understand or did not want to understand anything in them, and decided to hang them for treason.

“Why, many in the town traded with the Russians, so hang them all? thought Mukhmet, staggering through the deserted streets. - Well, it's none of my business. The gendarmes surely know better.”

Against the pink burning sky, the buildings of the abandoned city seemed black, dead. Not a single window shone with light, not a single human voice interrupted the silence. Wet wind slammed shutters and half-ripped doors. The sounds of distant firing were constantly heard, and black crows rushed through the pink sky with an angry cry.

Fear seized Mukhmet. What he had stayed for no longer seemed easy. The rain intensified. It was getting late.

He hurried to the old barracks, to the tree on which his friend, the merchant's son, was hanged. He rightly believed that the soldiers, in their haste to leave, probably left the body and did not bury it. However, he was not interested in the body. He stayed behind to get the rope with which his friend was hanged. Mukhmet knew for sure that the hanged man's rope brings happiness. That's what everyone said. With such a rope in your pocket, nothing is scary: whatever you take on, everything succeeds. You will win a lot of money in cards, you will approach the girl - she will fall in love. Then choose the most beautiful and richest and live for your own pleasure ...

He went out to the market square. Here in the morning the gendarmes dragged the merchant's son. He, Mukhmet, stood by his cart and saw it.

The merchant's son was pale, as if flour had been sprinkled on his face. His hands were tied, and his large black eyes looked in deathly anguish at the people he was being led past.

- Where are you taking me? he muttered. “I am not a traitor. Everyone here knows me. Ask whoever you want.

Mukhmet remembered how the burning black eyes of his friend looked at him.

- Ask him. He knows me. He is Turkish. Mukhmet, friend, do you know me? he said pleadingly.

“I don’t know,” Mukhmet replied, turning away. - Go.

He answered this way not because he wished harm to his friend, but because he did not want to get involved with the Turkish gendarmes. He did not think before that he had acted badly, but now, at night, in the black dead city, he seemed to feel sorry for the merchant's son. In essence, he was a good guy, although of a different faith. And the bride, they say, was. And his father had been friends with Mukhmet's father for many years. You didn't have to say:

- I do not know you. Go.

Mukhmet passed the market square and saw the old barracks. Their walls loomed in the pink sky, as if cut out of black paper. He walked around the building and behind it, near the garden, he saw the tree he was looking for. It was very dark here, but still he saw that its branches were bare and that the body of the hanged man had disappeared.

Anger seized Mukhmet: some strangers outwitted him, deceived him, stole his happiness ... In vain, it means that he stayed at night in this terrible dead city, risking every minute to fall into the hands of the Russians. Tired, hungry, drenched, he stood under a tree, peering into the lower branch to see if there was a rope left, and suddenly, stumbling over a bag, he fell.

A sharp squeal near his ear deafened him with fear. Something shied away and disappeared. His heart began to beat; he began to get up and immediately realized that the bag on which he stumbled was the body of his unfortunate friend - the dog, fussing around the fresh corpse, ran away, frightened that it was interrupted.

So, the gendarmes, leaving, removed the corpse from the tree. But did they leave the rope? Mukhmet, kneeling in front of the corpse of his friend, began to feel him. Here are the legs, chest, neck ... Mukhmet sighed happily: he found a wet rope. Thanks be to God: the rope is left! She walked around the neck, pulling it tight. Mukhmet, hands shaking with fear and joy, began to untie her. He accidentally touched the cheek of the deceased, and it seemed to him very cold, colder than the wet earth on which he stood.

- God, save me! he whispered in fear.

The rope was swollen from the rain, and it was difficult to untie the knot. He pulled once and twice, but the rope did not yield. Then he slipped his left hand from below between the neck and the rope and pulled again. The knot immediately loosened, and at the same moment, Mukhmet felt how sharp pincers grabbed the fingers of his left hand with incredible force and clenched.

He did not scream: someone else screamed in him with the desperate voice of a man who is being drowned. And at the same moment, close in the bushes, like an echo, howled the dog, which he had previously driven away from the corpse.

The iron tongs did not open. Mukhmet realized that it had been bitten by his merchant's son, innocently hanged. Terrible pain and horror at the thought that the dead one was biting poisoned his brain at once. His consciousness dimmed.

It seemed to him that the dead man was only pretending to be dead and was waiting for him, Mukhmet, to come and steal the rope from his neck. And he took revenge on him for the fact that Mukhmet said that he did not know him ...

“Let me go,” Mukhmet asked quietly, leaning towards the ground, and, since the dead man did not obey and did not let go, he shouted to the help of ravens and dogs:

- Let go-and-and!

And the dogs came to his call. They crawled out of cellars, out of cesspools and burrows, and one after another slowly approached closer and closer with disheveled, wet hair. The wild howl, which they had never heard before, attracted them with irresistible force. They crawled on their belly with their tails between their legs, with their hungry mouths open, as if hypnotized by a devilish call... Throughout the abandoned city, from end to end, this crazy howl was carried, echoed from afar by the booming explosions of steel cannons. And a faint pink glow, like the shadow of the War, fell on the ebony, on the old walls, on the silhouettes of crouching dogs and on the pale faces of two people, distorted by death and fear.

Early in the morning, an advance detachment of Russians drove up to the abandoned city. The cavalrymen were very surprised by the strange howl that resounded through the city. They stopped their horses and, having prepared their guns, listened. Howling and roaring a whole flock of dogs. First a dog barked in a special way, as if giving a signal, as if she were singing - and immediately the whole flock responded in a wild chorus. We drove closer, to the walls of the barracks, and saw a strange picture.

The man knelt before the bloated corpse and yelled like a dog. His fingers were caught in the dead teeth of a hanged man. At a distance of ten paces, sticking out their tongues, two dozen dogs sat in a circle and howled, raising their muzzles.

- Let go-and-and! the man barked.

- Wu-u-i-i! the dogs echoed immediately.

It seemed that this strange collection of dogs with a man in the middle sang a song of welcome to War.

The cavalrymen drove off the dogs and dismounted from their horses. When they managed to free Mukhmet's hand from the mortal bite of a dead man, the peasant did not understand anything. He went crazy and never got better.

Monthly literary and journalistic magazine and publishing house.

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Osip Dymov
Name at birth:	Iosif Isidorovich Perelman
Date of Birth:
Date of death:
Citizenship:	Russian empire Russian empire
Occupation:

Osip Dymov(a pseudonym taken from A. Chekhov's story "The Jumper"; real name Iosif Isidorovich Perelman, -) - Russian and Jewish (Yiddish) writer and playwright.

Dymov's father was from Poland; died early.

Family

Compositions

• Voice of Blood, 1903
• Solstice, 1905
• Cain, 1906
• Listen, Israel, 1907
• Every Day (Nu), Berlin, 1908 (family drama where a woman finds herself between an unloved husband and a young poet, in whom she is disappointed, and - not knowing which of them is the father of her unborn child - decides to die)
• The earth blossoms, 1908
• Vlas // "Apollo", 1909, No. 1-3 (the story of a teenager who matured early surrounded by people who do not understand him)
• Spring sorrow, 1910
• Stories, 1910
• Cross Runners, Berlin, 1911
• // almanac "Rosehip", No. 17, 1912 (the novel depicts the senseless vanity of the St. Petersburg "intelligentsia")
• Eternal Wanderer, 1914
• New Voices, 2nd ed. 1915

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Notes

Sources

• Cossack V. Lexicon of Russian literature of the XX century = Lexikon der russischen Literatur ab 1917 / [trans. with him.]. - M. : RIK "Culture", 1996. - XVIII, 491, p. - 5000 copies. - ISBN 5-8334-0019-8.
• I.Obukhov-Zelinska. Forgotten classics: the case of O. Dymov (correspondence of O. Dymov and A. Rumanov, 1902-1914). In the book: Russian Jews in America, book 5. Ed. E. Salzberg. Jerusalem-Toronto-St. Petersburg, 2011. P.72-114.

Links

	Osip Dymov at Wikiquote
	in Wikisource

• (biography)
• (unavailable link since 14-06-2016 (996 days))
• - article from the Electronic Jewish Encyclopedia
• Conversation with Vladimir Khazan, researcher of Dymov's work, on Radio Liberty

An excerpt characterizing Osip Dymov

- You hurried, very glad. Well, what does Paris say? he said, suddenly changing his previously stern expression to the most affectionate.
- Sire, tout Paris regrette votre absence, [Sir, all Paris regrets your absence.] - as it should, answered de Bosset. But although Napoleon knew that Bosset should say this or the like, although he knew in his clear moments that it was not true, he was pleased to hear this from de Bosset. He again honored him with a touch on the ear.
“Je suis fache, de vous avoir fait faire tant de chemin, [I am very sorry that I made you drive so far.],” he said.
– Sir! Je ne m "attendais pas a moins qu" a vous trouver aux portes de Moscou, [I expected no less than how to find you, sovereign, at the gates of Moscow.] - Bosse said.
Napoleon smiled and, absently raising his head, looked to his right. The adjutant came up with a floating step with a golden snuffbox and held it up. Napoleon took her.
- Yes, it happened well for you, - he said, putting an open snuffbox to his nose, - you like to travel, in three days you will see Moscow. You probably did not expect to see the Asian capital. You will make a pleasant trip.
Bosse bowed in gratitude for this attentiveness to his (hitherto unknown to him) propensity to travel.
- A! what's this? - said Napoleon, noticing that all the courtiers were looking at something covered with a veil. Bosse, with courtly agility, without showing his back, took a half-turn two steps back and at the same time pulled off the veil and said:
“A gift to Your Majesty from the Empress.
It was bright colors a portrait painted by Gerard of a boy born of Napoleon and the daughter of the Austrian emperor, whom for some reason everyone called the king of Rome.
A very handsome curly-haired boy, with a look similar to that of Christ in Sistine Madonna, was depicted as playing bilbock. The orb represented the globe, and the wand in the other hand represented the scepter.
Although it was not entirely clear what exactly the painter wanted to express, imagining the so-called King of Rome piercing the globe with a stick, but this allegory, like everyone who saw the picture in Paris, and Napoleon, obviously, seemed clear and very pleased.
“Roi de Rome, [Roman King.],” he said, pointing gracefully at the portrait. – Admirable! [Wonderful!] - With the Italian ability to change the expression at will, he approached the portrait and pretended to be thoughtful tenderness. He felt that what he would say and do now was history. And it seemed to him that the best thing he could do now was that he, with his greatness, as a result of which his son in bilbock played with the globe, so that he showed, in contrast to this greatness, the simplest paternal tenderness. His eyes dimmed, he moved, looked around at the chair (the chair jumped under him) and sat down on it opposite the portrait. One gesture from him - and everyone tiptoed out, leaving himself and his feeling of a great man.
After sitting for some time and touching, for what he did not know, with his hand until the rough reflection of the portrait, he got up and again called Bosse and the duty officer. He ordered the portrait to be taken out in front of the tent, so as not to deprive the old guard, who stood near his tent, of the happiness of seeing the Roman king, the son and heir of their adored sovereign.
As he expected, while he was breakfasting with Monsieur Bosse, who had been honored with this honor, enthusiastic cries of officers and soldiers of the old guard were heard in front of the tent.

Ivan Tolstoy: There are writers who cannot be forgotten by foreign literature. Imagine that someone decides to take the pseudonym Andrei Bolkonsky. The paper of his editions would rather decay than a literary name be forgotten. This technique was successfully applied at one time by Joseph Isidorovich Perelman, taking the name from Chekhov's "Jumping Girl" - Osip Dymov. The name is so successful (like everything else with Chekhov) that I remember how pleasant it was to walk in Moscow along Malaya Dmitrovka, where until recently there was a restaurant - “Dymov number one”. Very stylish. Too bad it's been renamed. Dymov the writer fired recently from two guns. The University of Jerusalem published an excellent two-volume collection of his memoirs and letters “I remembered, I wanted to tell ...: From the memoir and epistolary heritage”. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Center of Slavic Languages ​​and Literatures, 2011, and the Gesharim - Bridges of Culture publishing house prepared a one-volume book based on it, called "From Isadora Duncan to Fyodor Chaliapin".
Osip Dymov was returned to readers by Professor of Jerusalem University Vladimir Khazan. Vladimir Ilyich is one of the most interesting and prolific literary historians of recent years. I will name several of his publications - a collection of works by the poet Dovid Knut, a two-volume book dedicated to Pinchas Rutenberg (an accomplice in the murder of Priest Gapon), the monograph “Odyssey of Captain Boyevsky”. One of Khazan's favorite themes is Russian Paris. And here is Osip Dymov.

Vladimir Khazan: His real name is Osip Perelman, who became Osip Dymov, taking on a Chekhov pseudonym, as is clear, because he was looking for some kind of overcoming of his biographical reality, his biographical specificity, entry into Russian literature. And one fine night, on the advice of his boss, to whom he came to the magazine (the well-known magazine Theater and Art, one of the best magazines in pre-revolutionary Russia), Alexander Rafailovich Kugel, who said: “Well, what kind of surname is this - Perelman? We need a pseudonym, ”our hero thought, racked his brains all night in St. Petersburg, and in the morning the thought came to his mind that it would be nice to become the hero of his favorite writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, especially since the name here coincided - Osip Perelman, Osip Dymov . And he thus became Dymov, naturally including in his pseudonym not only the hero of his beloved Chekhov, but also the idea that there is no need to look for any values ​​outside of his own personality, that everything is nearby, at hand. And, in general, it was one of the mottos, the hidden motto of his whole life: everything is in yourself, in your own personality, you need circumstances, will, desire, talent in order to reveal these qualities. And thus Osip Perelman, a small-town Jew from the city of Bialystok, becomes the Russian writer Osip Dymov, who, by the way, became not only his pseudonym, but in general the surname of his family, since both his wife and daughter Isadora also became Dymovs.

Ivan Tolstoy: Vladimir Ilyich, let's start ab ovo, that is, with the biography of our today's hero - who is he, where is he from, what is the environment in which he was born, who are his parents? Tell us, please, about the pre-literary stage of his life, and we will move on to literature in due time.

Vladimir Khazan: Osip Isidorovich Perelman was born on February 4, 1878 in the provincial Bialystok, then part of Russian Empire, a city that was beyond the Pale of Settlement. And this fact was very significant for the future Russian-Jewish, and then completely Jewish writer Osip Dymov, because along with the Pale of Settlement, along with the conquest of St. Petersburg, he had to win literary fame in this life, and literary success, and in general to prove themselves on different platforms, in different areas of their vigorous activity and in their variety of talents.
So, in February 1878, in a provincial small, two-thirds Jewish Bialystok, a boy is born in the Perelman family. Father - a German Jew, mother - who knew Russian and, of course, spoke German. Therefore, both German and Yiddish were spoken in the house, hence Dymov's multilingualism, which over time will develop into such a quality as his literary bilingualism, which is extremely important for literary style, and for the place it occupies in both the Russian literary and American-Yiddish literary empires.
There were four children in the family, the fifth girl died, having lived for a short time in this world. At the age of six, Osip lost his father and, in fact, the mother raised four children herself, alone, and the complex of fatherlessness, the orphanhood complex remained forever in Dymovo as the theme of his literary writings, as a kind of complex in the very moral personality of this person, who was looking for some connections, some wholeness of the world, because in the family, due to its dramatic collisions, and this is well felt both in his memoirs and in his numerous literary works, according to novels, according to plays, according to stories, he lacked all this in childhood, lacked paternal attention, lacked, and he writes about this quite sharply and dramatically, affection from his mother. But the family rose, the family entered the history of literature, not only Russian, but also European, American. In passing, I want to say that there was another very interesting figure in the family, Osip's brother Yakov Perelman, whom we all know well. Ivan Nikitich, you probably remember well, and our generation knows this person well from his numerous popularizing books on astronomy, physics, and mathematics - “Entertaining trigonometry”, “ Entertaining mathematics”, “Entertaining algebra”. Yakov Perelman, who, unfortunately, died in the besieged Leningrad, died of starvation in 42, this is the brother of Osip Perelman.
The third, oldest brother - Herman Perelman - died during the Catastrophe in Nazi Germany. I tried to trace his fate, but, alas, it did not work out. One of the many victims of Nazism.
There was also a sister, Anna, who, most likely, also died during the Second World War in Leningrad. This is such a family.
Speaking about the biography of Osip Dymov, I would like to say that the family was with a large number of branches, cousins, cousins ​​and, thanks to this, since part of the family lived in St. Petersburg (these are the brothers and sisters of his mother, nee Erlich), through these people When he was already in St. Petersburg, when he arrived there at the end of the 19th century, in 1899, and entered the Forestry Institute, through them he entered the world of the Russian-Jewish or, in general, the Russian intelligentsia. In particular, his uncle, who was only four years older than him, Yakov Erlich, his mother's brother, introduced him to the symbolist circle. Erlich was a talented young man who died of mental illness, he was not even 24 years old, his closest friends were Valery Bryusov, Alexander Dobrolyubov, Ivan Konevskoy.
Through Yakov Erlich, a talented musicologist, mathematician, philosopher, who died too early, so he failed to incarnate and did not leave bright traces equal to his personality, Osip Dymov entered the intelligentsia of young St. Petersburg writers, met, in particular, Alexander Dobrolyubov, to which more and more interest today arises as one of the forerunners of symbolism, closest friend Valery Bryusov, a man of a very strange fate. In Dymov's memoirs, written in Yiddish, one of the chapters is dedicated to Alexander Dobrolyubov. Moreover, Dymov, who knew him directly, met him, saw him in different situations, recalls things about him that cannot be found in any other descriptions.
After moving to St. Petersburg, another chapter begins in the story of Dymov's life.

Ivan Tolstoy: Here is one quote from an old review of the Dymovskiy collection of short stories "Solstice" of 1905. Korney Chukovsky writes:

“Dymov is an impressionist.
Artists modern city– inevitably the Impressionists.
Their visions are too quick and fleeting for them to embody them clearly, clearly, in detail in their creations.
Two or three inspirational strokes - and that's enough. Two or three hints. Yes, otherwise you can’t convey, otherwise you won’t capture those half-feelings, half-passions, half-desires that are born and go out in the crazy phantasmagoria of a big city.
It was the Umbrian monks who could write every leaf on a tree and every hair in their beard. There were no railroads, no horse-drawn carriages, no steamboats, no electricity, and it never happened to the Umbrian monks in one day to meet millions of trees, millions of beards. Impressionism - the creation of a big city, the creation of a fast pace of life. Dymov is an impressionist.
In the sketch "Lydia Bierens" he needs to depict a lonely bachelor life. To do this, he notes that when his hero ate, “crumbs of bread with a dry crack fell on the newspaper” - and nothing more. He gives the whole picture of an inhospitable existence in a small speck, in a hint - and does this make the picture lose in any way in its strength, in its energy, in its expressiveness. Oh, of course not, on the contrary. The city teaches how to save money - even artistic ones.
Dymov wants to convey to the reader a vulgar metropolitan feast.
This subtle and strong picture does not take even ten lines from him:
“After dinner, officer Krasnov told jokes. Although he was an infantry officer, but, finishing the story, he bowed as if he wore spurs. Particularly interesting was the story of how the conductor dropped off at the station not the passenger who asked for it, but another. Then two young ladies played the piano, very similar, but not at all sisters ... At the third hour they parted; an officer without spurs, but pretending to have them, said for some unknown reason:
- Lord Beaconsfield, or a rendezvous of carefree friends. The Rock bird has four raging wings.
In general, the evening was a success. Thank you owners."

So Korney Chukovsky wrote in a review of 1905.
Vladimir Ilyich, it's one thing to be in literary circle, another thing is to take place in it. How did Dymov manage to do this? What qualities were needed for this and how did they manifest themselves in his fate?

Vladimir Khazan: If you'll excuse me, I'll start from afar. In general, the figure of Dymov is a strange figure. I have been doing it for quite a few years, there were different times, different approaches, until I decided to publish his known and unknown memoirs. Unknown, because they are written in a rather closed language, Yiddish, known, because they are partially, in their various fragments, in different time were translated. Memories, which include a huge amount of information, a lot of interesting points of contact with Russian culture, with the Jewish world, with Jews in St. Petersburg, with relations between Jews and Russians at different times.
I was thinking about the Dymov phenomenon as such. Amazing personality, amazing destiny! Striking in that in Dymovo we have a certain famous non-celebrity, or, better to say, even an unfamous celebrity. On the one hand, a brilliant writer, artist, without whom it is difficult to imagine the history of the Silver Age, in general, the history of Russian literature of the late XIX - early XX centuries. The writer, without whom it is difficult to imagine Russian dramaturgy, which was very active in the West - he was staged a lot on the Western stage and on the Russian stage too. It was staged by Meyerhold, it was staged by Mardzhanov, it was staged by major directors, the largest Russian actors took part in performances based on his plays. If the Komissarzhevskaya Theater had not ceased to exist, surely his plays would have been staged there as well.
On the other hand, to this day we have practically no information about his life and work. For the average Russian, Russian reader, Dymov is a closed figure, if not to say that it is generally unknown or half-known. Dymov, who left Russia in 1913, went to America, changed his citizenship, changed his literary orientation, changed the nature of his work, from a Russian writer, writer, journalist, playwright, novelist, he becomes a Jewish-American playwright, short story writer. The second part of his life, and he died in 1959, having lived enough great life essentially passes under other skies. The most interesting thing is that he does not leave Russian literature either, he is printed in Russian, published in the Russian emigre press. Until the end of 1929 (an amazing case in the history of emigration!) Dymov was his own correspondent for Krasnaya Gazeta, which was published in Leningrad. He is not just a pro-Soviet writer, he is a writer who is a Soviet journalist in the West. At the same time, he is a well-known screenwriter. He spent the second half of the 20s - the beginning of the 30s in Europe. He is a famous playwright, his plays are shown in Germany, France, not to mention America. Many theaters, not only Jewish theaters, stage his plays. He speaks decently enough, as a writer, as a person who writes, translates, four languages ​​- Russian, English, Yiddish and German. This opens the door to various literary fields for him.
At the same time, Dymov is a figure that has been little studied, little studied. The amount written by Dymov is almost incalculable. I once took up work just to compile some elementary bibliography, at least in the first approximation to figure out what, where and how much he wrote. And, in general, I abandoned this hopeless undertaking, because it is impossible to collect the texts written by Dymov in all those languages ​​that I have listed. He wrote energetically, quickly, published a lot, published in various press organs in Europe, America, Russia. I have already said that in Krasnaya Gazeta, but before the revolution, while living in America, I was actively published in many publications, newspapers and magazines, the Russian Birzhevye Vedomosti, and so on.
There are, of course, a lot of contradictions between the quantity and quality of what he wrote, but at the same time, Dymov has several texts that are included in the world treasury of literature, I say this with full responsibility. For example, his wonderful play "Nu", which was staged in the most major theaters America, Europe and Russia. Or, say, his collection of short stories "Solstice", which was published in 1905, when he was still living in Russia, which, in general, meant a new word in Russian literature, carried an impressionistic stamp. And, in general, Dymov, in a certain sense, appeared in a cohort of those writers who open an impressionistic page unknown to Russian literature at that time, extremely important, extremely interesting, which developed in various ways later in Russian literature. So many contradictions have accumulated in Dymov's figure that it is impossible to resolve all of them in one fell swoop, with one blow, and, having published two volumes of his memoirs and letters, I feel myself in the position of a person who knows little about him, or at least doesn't know much about him. Much in the biography of Dymov is still unknown, not studied, not investigated, as it should be.
When I speak of Dymov's contradictions, what do I mean here, and what is the discussion about here? Dymov belongs to the category of those rare writers, those rare writers in whose talent there are mutually exclusive beginnings. On the one hand, he is a poignant lyricist. The book of stories "Solstice", published in 1905 and received a wonderful, exceptional press, he was praised by all who read, at the same time, with lyrical shrillness, with sadness, with sadness, in Dymovo, in some unknown way, a caustic, sharp satirist gets along and humorist. He was one of the authors, and very fruitful authors, literary group"Satyricon". Along with the humorist and parodist, Dymov has very deep dramatic beginnings, which are embodied in his dramaturgy, in his numerous plays. Not all of these plays are successful. When he gets to America, he begins to imitate the style of Broadway theaters with their tricks, with their effects, and much in his work, especially in the work of traditional, Russian, is lost. Nevertheless, his plays are a completely stable, established fact, which is noted in all textbooks on the history of Russian, European and world theater. His plays are mentioned, although they do not occupy the top line, but they exist.
Along with this immersion in the deep psychologism of dramatic characters, circumstances, situations, family dramas which he carried from his own family, Dymov, like any profound artist, is extremely autobiographical. At the same time, he showed himself interestingly in the late 20s, especially in the 30s, as a screenwriter. Ivan Bunin, the Nobel laureate, the pride and glory of Russian literature, writes him a letter and asks Dymov (they were well acquainted back in Russian times) to help him, to help him get acquainted with some film companies, English film companies, with Hollywood, if possible ( and Dymov cooperates with Hollywood, his screenplays, dozens of screenplays, are on the screens), to help enter this system, a completely new system for Russian writers and Russian writers. Of course, no one compares, of course, it is clear what Ivan Bunin is for world culture, for world literature, and what Osip Dymov is. Of course, these are two phenomena of a different order, of a different scale, but the history of literature, the history of world, European and Russian culture, among other things, shows that everything was much more complicated.
And you can’t impose on such phenomena as our character, like Osip Dymov, such primitive schoolboy ideas, because in a certain sense this person played for the fate of Russian literature, for the fate of European literature, for the fate, I’m not afraid of this word, world literature and culture , an extremely important and significant role.

Ivan Tolstoy: Vladimir Ilyich, after all, I wanted to ask about those pebbles along which Osip Perelman went deep into literature and deep into his recognition in his very first years. What did he rely on anyway? Well, here was the help of a brother, there were literary acquaintances among the symbolists. Could you specify, name some main names, main milestones on the way to the first recognition of our today's hero?

Vladimir Khazan: First of all, it is necessary to say and mention the absolutely remarkable, in part forgotten name the largest theater critic, playwright, translator, a person who knew everything about the theater, who was the main expert theater life, theater history, theatrical art in Russia at the turn of the century in the future - Alexander Rafailovich Kugel. Dymov, who had a difficult attitude towards Alexander Rafailovich, has about five, six, even seven memoir sketches about this man. He included some of them, as a kind of coherent text, in his Yiddish memoirs “Wos ich gedenk” (“What I remember”), some of them remained in his archive, I tried all of them in some way, without repeating , to be included in the published two-volume book in order to have a clear and complete idea, on the one hand, of the role and place of this person in the history of the theatrical culture of Russia, and, on the other hand, of the attitude, rather difficult, ambiguous, towards him of his pet Osip Dymov.
In 1899, Osip Dymov began to serve with Kugel as the secretary of his journal Theater and Art. The magazine was located in Kugel's own apartment in the center of St. Petersburg, Dymov's secretarial desk served as an ordinary dining table in Kugel's apartment, Kugel's famous dressing gown took part in Dymov's secretarial household, in the pockets of which one could find absolutely all the manuscripts, all versions sent to the editorial office. Therefore, Dymov, who was a witty person in the highest degree, mastered the word, knew how to parody, knew how to present, knew how to tell, repeatedly beats his meetings with Kugel and meetings with people that took place in the editorial office of Theater and Art. And all this is, on the one hand, the form of such a light and wonderful, in its irony, burlesque, and, on the other hand, there are some dramatic pages in the history of the Russian theater and the people of the Russian theater, which Dymov recalls, since there were connected the largest forces on the theatrical map of Russia. And since Kugel had a very difficult, if not to say hatred, attitude towards the Moscow Art Theater(since his own wife, Kholmskaya, was not taken by Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko as an actress, and all Kugel's reviews of the Moscow Art Theater or, as they called it then, the Moscow public theater, were purely negative character), these, on the one hand, are funny and entertaining, on the other hand, quite dramatic circumstances are described by Dymov.
But Kugel really played in this sense the role of the first mentor, truly wise with experience, theatrical, life experience, a person who helped Dymov a lot and introduced him to the literary, theatrical environment of the then Petersburg.
Dymov's own talent played a big role, a certain talent, I'm not talking about all the talent now. Of course, Dymov was an unusually capable person, he drew beautifully and was a caricaturist, his very accurate poisonous drawings appeared on the pages of the same “Theater and Art”, towards the end of his life he became a sculptor, sculpted beautifully, took lessons from famous sculptor Dobuzhinsky, already in America, in a word, nature did not deprive him of his talents.
But among Dymov's talents there was a certain talent that I would generally put at the forefront. This is the talent of a sharp word. Perhaps this sounds when we are talking about a serious writer, a major writer, especially since Russian literature, with its unsmiling, with its harsh, serious attitude towards the world in general, towards the picture of the world, does not consider that the talent for a sharp word, snarling, poisonous arrows of irony, ridicule was part of the set of obligatory gentlemanly qualities of a Russian writer. Dymov, in essence, the first, remaining, on the one hand, a completely serious writer, accepted in “serious” literary salons, turned out to be what we today would call an entertainer, a leader, a person who knew how to make the audience laugh. In addition to his literary texts, in addition to his satyricon texts, he knew how to simply make the audience laugh, he knew how to tell a funny Jewish anecdote.
On the one hand, this does not seem so necessary. On the other hand, this created a certain fame for him not only in St. Petersburg, but, in general, in Russia. Dymov traveled quite a lot with his speeches, and with the Satyricon group, and alone. This created him the fame of a sociable, sociable person who knew how to joke, who knew how to defuse the situation. Considering that the Russian literature of that time, I am now talking about the Russian literature of the Silver Age, was mainly salon (remember the meetings and meetings at the Tower of Vyacheslav Ivanov, where Dymov was just a long-awaited guest, meetings at Sologub and many other literary salons), that ability to imitate (and Dymov, among other things, had the talent of a parodist, he simply imitated his voice, and, judging by Remizov’s memoirs, he did it extremely successfully, he imitated the manner, gestures, facial expressions, voice character of his character; there are a huge number memories of how Dymov famously managed to do this, for example, when they gathered at Leonid Andreev's - Leonid Andreev was among Osip Dymov's closest friends, and when he acted out such small sketches, written by himself or born improvisationally, he showed Leonid Andreev and conversations within his family; there are memories that when Dymov portrayed this, Chukovsky, his other closest friend, with whom they edited the satirical magazine Signal, simply fell under a chair, and since Chukovsky was of enormous growth, he folded into four and under this chair climbed up because there was no place to lie flat on the floor: people were sitting around and other chairs were in the way, it was extremely funny and unusually fun), this sociability, this contact was manifested not only in some funny scenes, parodies, mocking, comedy , it also manifested itself in purely serious relationship Dymova with major figures world science and world culture.
For example, he was closely acquainted with Albert Einstein, corresponded with him, his plays were shown in the theater of Max Reinhardt, a major director. Who was staged on the Berlin and Vienna stages of the Max Reinhardt Theater? The very first Russian playwrights. I'm not talking about Chekhov, that's understandable. It could have been Sologub, some of his plays, but Dymov was also staged. Dymov went with a bang in "Kammerspiel" by Max Reinhardt, in 1908 his play was staged.
Dymov's friendship with German-speaking writers, Austrian and German, with a future Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, with Peter Altenberg, with Arthur Schnitzler (Dymov is mentioned many times in Schnitzler's diaries). Friendship with the outstanding European actor Alexander Moissi. If you start listing the circle of Dymov's friends, acquaintances, who were part of a very close, not at the level of some kind of meeting or a nod of the head, Dymov's circle of friends, it will take a huge amount of time. His close friend, with whom he was on “you”, was the singer Leonid Sobinov. He maintained close relations with Fedor Ivanovich Chaliapin. In this sense, you can list a lot and for a long time.

Ivan Tolstoy: You named "Nu" and the collection "Solstice". What are the most important, most shocking things of Dymov's pre-revolutionary period?

Vladimir Khazan: Unfortunately, Dymov was a writer who at the same time trampled new paths in literature. "Solstice" - in fiction, in the genre of a short story, impressionistic, the play "Nu" - in the genre of dramaturgy, these are the heights of Osip Dymov. Simultaneously with the trampling of these new paths, simultaneously with small literary revolutions, Dymov was distinguished by a certain quality that narrowed the range of his creative significance; secondary, and critics wrote a lot about this in their time.
I, very briefly answering your question, want to say the most important thing here. Dymov simultaneously exists both in elitist literature, in literature that is literature for all time (not elitist in the sense that it exists for the elite, but literature that has no time limits, great, real literature), and at the same time he exists in mass literature, in the literature of medium fiction. This contradiction, one of Dymov's many contradictions, creates a sharp contrast between Dymov, a real, genuine, great, talented writer, and Dymov, a mediocre novelist, newspaperman, journalist, a man who follows the literary fashion and definitely wants to match it. The same quality manifested itself, paradoxically, in America as well. Along with a major play that captured literally all American stages, the play “The Bronx Express”, which ran first in America, then in Europe, which he wrote very soon after his arrival in America, many plays exploited, as they say, an already found theme . And therefore, sooner or later, they left the repertoire, they became secondary, they stopped their stage life.
But once again I want to emphasize that with the abundance that the writer Osip Dymov left behind (I am now talking only about his Russian-language texts), of course, you can always find a number of his stories, novels, for example, such a novel as “The Anguish of the Spirit ”, written by him back in Russia. A novel, in my opinion, not read, what is called a “novel with a key”, about very recognizable characters and types of heroes who inhabited the then Petersburg.
At the same time, I repeat, Dymov is many-sided, multifaceted, a very large and very negative role in his creative destiny, in his writer's destiny was played by the fact that he was what is called a reporter, a newspaperman, and until the end of his life he did not leave this sphere here either. his own creative work. This was reflected in his style, and in the fact that many of Dymov's works, many of Dymov's texts did not settle down, they were in the nature of some kind of fluent writing, they hunted for a sensation, they caught the present, while his main and better things exist, like I already said forever.

Ivan Tolstoy: You spoke about the environment of Osip Dymov, about those bright figures with whom he was close. And why, then, did he leave Russia and even cross the ocean? I ended up in literary America, about which very little was known then, at the beginning of the 20th century, and even more so about literary and Russian literary America. What was the reason for emigration?

Vladimir Khazan: Ivan Nikitich, but, in general, there was no emigration. It is wrong to think that Dymov emigrated. Emigration became emigration in later years. And it is curious that in the reference books of the 1960-80s Dymov is referred to as emigrants of the First Wave, after the Bolshevik revolution, although he left in the fall of 1913. He did not emigrate, he simply went overseas, at the invitation of the Directorate of Jewish Theaters, to stage his play. He wrote the play (back in Russian times) “The Eternal Wanderer”, created a troupe of wandering actors in the Sholom Aleichem spirit, the play was permeated with Jewish motifs, and drove this play around the cities and towns, starting from the south of Russia to Western Ukraine, in particular , to Poland, to his native Bialystok, and so on. And one day he met with a representative of the Directorate American theaters Barak Tomashevsky, who ended up in Europe and who invited him to stage this play on the American Jewish stage. So he ended up in America. I suspect that this, like everything in life, has some texts, subtexts and contexts. Dymov was probably going to America for a long time. At least I am publishing a letter when he addresses the same Directorate, this was in 1911, no proposals have yet been received.
When he ended up in America, the First World War began, then 1917 with its revolutions. In essence, there was nowhere to return, or, at least, it was necessary to return to another country, to another Russia. Dymov did not return. But, I repeat, he carried in himself a completely pro-Russian spirit, and then, already in the 1920s, completely pro-Soviet. Therefore, Dymov is not a traditional immigrant. And when his close friend in Russian times, the journalist of Satirikon, Petr Pilsky, wrote in the Riga emigre newspaper Segodnya in 1928, when Dymov was 50 years old, such an “anniversary”, rather offensive article, where he showed Dymov such a lucky, such an opportunist , such a person who is simply lucky, who was born in a shirt or with a silver spoon in his mouth, who succeeded ...
Of course, Dymov was for the emigrants a hungry, half-destitute, living from one beggarly fee to another, a red rag, as he turned out to be for Pilsky. But Dymov, in this sense, is not a traditional emigrant, and the very theme of emigration enters his work rather late, in the 1920s, when he was just comprehending his experience.
Here I save for your next question a big and difficult topic about Dymov the stranger for Russian literature. Even in Russian times, he remained rather alien to Russian literature, and it is no coincidence that he became a bilingual writer. As they sometimes gossip about Nabokov, that he is not a Russian writer, there is something foreign in him, he does not write in Russian. I do not compare, in this case, I just cite Nabokov as an example, a parallel, as a kind of type. This is exactly what existed, and not only because he was a Jew, and not only because he represented a certain Jewish spirit in the Russian writer. Of course, this spirit is important, but it does not explain everything and does not exhaust everything. Dymov was a rather fruitful irritant, "other" in Russian literature, when he was still living in Russia and when he had not yet thought about any overseas travels.

Ivan Tolstoy: Osip Dymov in the 1920s, as you have already mentioned several times, becomes a completely pro-Soviet writer, he is published in Krasnaya Gazeta, he is published in the Soviet Union, he is really not a classic émigré. And here the fate of another person comes to my mind, who also moved from Europe to America in the early 1920s, also very early in the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century. I mean Vetlugin. After all, his fate, in something, at least in some steps, was similar to the fate of Dymov. He also published in Soviet newspapers while living in America, in New York, he, like Dymov, went to Hollywood to seek his fortune, he also wrote scripts, and these scripts have come down to us, they are partially known (though he later became a producer, unlike Dymov), and so on. Is there some intentional similarity between their two destinies, or am I bringing these two destinies too vigorously together?

Vladimir Khazan: It seems to me that a very successful and quite natural rapprochement. I think that not only Vetlugin shares a certain typology of the fate of such involuntary emigrants who, in a certain sense, became emigrants out of necessity, although the bulk of emigration became emigration out of necessity.
I would also give the example of David Burliuk, who, by the way, participated in the same newspaper “Russian Voice”, an American, New York emigre newspaper, completely pro-Soviet, in which Vetlugin was published, in which Osip Dymov was published, in which David Burliuk. The fact that Vetlugin was closely acquainted with Dymov is an absolutely indisputable fact. True, I did not find correspondence, but one mentions the other, they knew each other closely in America. The very problem of the sympathies of emigrants, who, on the one hand, experienced discord with the Soviet government, with the Bolsheviks, and had nothing in common, but then warmed up, then some romances with the Soviet government appeared, the very fate of these emigrant writers is quite interesting and little studied. And I am grateful to your question, because I think that, yes, Dymov, in a certain sense, shared the fate of people who were equally talented in their own way, who were not lost in the West, who proved themselves. You can treat them differently, you can evaluate their society differently, you can treat their ideology and political mask differently, but the fact that they are worthy of study are worthy of mention, and that the destinies that are woven into the overall mosaic fates, a rather motley mosaic of the fates of literature of the twentieth century, which turned out to be beyond its own borders, this is undoubtedly done.
I think that his warming, his Bolshevism was largely due to an attempt to penetrate his creativity into Soviet Union. In the two-volume book already mentioned by you, I am citing a description of his meeting, say, with Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky at the Berlin embassy in 1928, when Lunacharsky was still the people's commissar of education. And Lunacharsky offered him, for certain fees, and Dymov refers to writers for whom the concept of success, literary glory, popularity, luck, fees were not empty words at all and were an important part literary career, Dymov, of course, dreamed that his plays would be shown as they were in Romania or in Germany, so that they would be in the Soviet Union.
In the 1920s, in 1927, even before the death of Alexander Kugel, who headed the All-Russian Theater Society, he corresponded with Dymov and openly offered him plays for staging in the Soviet Union, and Kugel did not at all deny such a possibility and staging plays, and publishing them.

Ivan Tolstoy: Vladimir Ilya, where and when did Osip Dymov die?

Vladimir Khazan: Dymov died at the beginning of 1959, he died in New York from a heart attack. He lived a long and interesting life, full of various events, his death came from old age. Unfortunately, I am unable to talk about recent years and the days of Osip Dymov, when he, a person generally mystical-minded (he is a mystical writer, we, unfortunately, did not raise this topic today), burst out with a whole series of essays about his hypnotic, about his mysterious abilities to unravel other people's thoughts, to unravel human life handwriting, and so on. He died at the same time as a Russian writer, and this was noted in the Russian émigré press, in particular, in the New York newspaper New Russian Word, and this was noted, of course, by numerous obituaries in the Yiddish press, in the American press, since , I repeat, Dymov was a writer who divided both in himself and from the point of view of the outside world, as if divided into two halves: on the one hand, a Russian writer, Russian writer, Russian journalist, on the other hand, an American Jewish writer, who died at the beginning of 1959.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to meet his daughter, who is also no longer with us, and, unfortunately, I don’t really imagine Dymov’s descendants, whom I have never seen, whom I don’t know, but whom I intend to find and whom I intend to meet, because I intend to continue this interesting work.