Sentimental Journey

Memoirs 1917-1922
St. Petersburg-Galicia-Persia-Saratov-Kyiv-Petersburg-Dnepr-Petersburg-Berlin

The narrative begins with a description of events February Revolution in Petrograd.
Continues in Galicia during the July (1917) offensive of the Southwestern Front, the disintegration of the Russian army in Persia in the vicinity of Lake Urmia and its withdrawal (both there the author was a commissar of the Provisional Government), then participation in conspiracies against the Bolsheviks in Petrograd and Saratov province and against Hetman Skoropadsky in Kiev, return to Petrograd and receiving (along the way) an amnesty from the Cheka, devastation and famine in Petrograd, travel to Ukraine in search of his wife who had left there from hunger, and service in the Red Army as a demolition instructor.
A new (after injury) return to Petrograd, new deprivations - and against this background - a stormy literary and scientific life. Threat of arrest and flight from Russia. The novel ends (as the genre is defined by the author) with the story of an acquaintance from his service in Persia, Aisor, whom he met in Petrograd about the tragic events after the departure of the Russian army.
While participating in these turbulent events, the author did not forget to write articles and books, which was reflected in the pages dedicated to Stern, Blok and his funeral, “The Serapion Brothers”, etc.

Mirsky:

“he (Shklovsky) has a place not only in the theory of literature, but also in literature itself, thanks to a wonderful book of memoirs, the title for which he, true to himself, took from his beloved Stern - Sentimental Journey (1923); it tells his adventures from the February Revolution to 1921. Apparently the book is named so on the principle of “lucus a non lucendo” (“the grove does not shine” - the Latin form, meaning “in contrast”), because what is most remarkable is that sentimentality is erased from the book without a trace . The most terrible events, such as the massacre of Kurds and Aysors in Yurmia, are described with deliberate calm and with an abundance of factual details. Despite the affectively sloppy and careless style, the book is excitingly interesting. Unlike so many current Russian books, it is complete intelligence and common sense. Moreover, she is very truthful and, despite the lack of sentimentality, intensely emotional."

Sentimental Journey, Viktor Shklovsky - read book online
A few quotes.

IN civil war two voids step on each other.
There are no white and red armies.
I'm not kidding. I saw the war.

She told me how sad it was under the whites in Kherson.
They hung them on the street lamps of the main streets.
They will hang you and leave you hanging.
Children from school pass by and gather around a lantern. They are standing.
This story is not specifically Kherson; according to stories, this was also done in Pskov.
I think I know white people. In Nikolaev, the whites shot three Vonsky brothers for banditry, one of them was a doctor, the other a sworn attorney - a Menshevik. The corpses lay in the street for three days. The fourth brother, Vladimir Vonsky, my assistant in the 8th Army, then went to the rebels. Now he is a Bolshevik.
White people hang people from lampposts and shoot people on the street out of romanticism.
So they hanged one boy, Polyakov, for organizing an armed uprising. He was 16-17 years old.
Before his death, the boy shouted: “Long live Soviet power!”
Since whites are romantics, they published in the newspaper that he died a hero.
But they hanged him.

Now about the machine guns on the roofs. I was called to shoot them down for almost two weeks. Usually, when it seemed that they were shooting from the window, they began to shoot randomly at the house from rifles, and the dust from the plaster, rising in the places of impact, was mistaken for return fire. I am convinced that the bulk of those killed during the February Revolution were killed by our own bullets, directly falling on us from above.
My team searched almost the entire area of ​​Vladimirsky, Kuznechny, Yamskoy and Nikolaevsky, and I do not have a single positive statement about the discovery of a machine gun on the roof.
But we shot a lot into the air, even from cannons.

To clarify their role, I will give a parallel. I'm not a socialist, I'm a Freudian.
A man is sleeping and hears the front door bell ringing. He knows he needs to get up, but he doesn't want to. And so he comes up with a dream and inserts this bell into it, motivating it in another way - for example, in a dream he can see Matins.
Russia invented the Bolsheviks as a dream, as a motivation for flight and plunder, but the Bolsheviks are not guilty of dreaming about them.
Who called?
Maybe a World Revolution.

... I’m not sorry that I kissed and ate and saw the sun; It’s a pity that I approached and wanted to direct something, but everything went on rails. ... I haven't changed anything. ...
When you fall like a stone, you don’t need to think; when you think, you don’t need to fall. I mixed two crafts.
The reasons that moved me were outside of me.
The reasons that moved others were outside of them.
I am just a falling stone.
A stone that falls and can at the same time light a lantern to observe its path.

I have walked a lot around the world and seen different wars, and I still have the impression that I was in a donut hole.
And I have never seen anything terrible. Life is not thick.
And war consists of great mutual ineptitude.

... the weight of the habits of the world attracted the stone of life thrown horizontally by the revolution to the ground.
The flight turns into a fall.

It’s not right that we suffered so much for nothing and that things haven’t changed.

Scary country.
Terrible to the Bolsheviks.

They were already wearing riding breeches. And the new officers wore stacks like the old ones. ... And then everything became as before.

Shklovsky - interesting person. Unlike most, who hit one point, he was completely unfocused and was completely engaged different things up to the opposite. For example, he himself wrote and was himself engaged in literary criticism, that is, he analyzed the books of others, which is rarely combined in one individual.

As a writer, he was a genius of metaphors - precise, beautiful, and at the same time far-fetched from a great distance. A master of very distant associations - now they would say “a virtuoso of pulling an owl onto a globe.” It was he who invented, for example, the “Hamburg account”, which has since wandered through articles and books.

His biography in his youth was no less stormy. He wrote the book “Sentimental Journey” in 1924 in Berlin, where he fled from St. Petersburg, fearing arrest. Before that, he managed to visit Persia, participating in the First World War. Then he was tossed all over Russia - along with the revolution and the civil one.

After Berlin, he returned to the USSR, although he was never a Bolshevik, and lived quietly until old age, simultaneously writing books on literary criticism, fiction books, articles and film scripts.

The figure was colorful, so many writers copied him in their books, including Bulgakov (in The White Guard).

Now there are many naive people in LiveJournal who are looking forward to the revolution and the subsequent improvement of their own situation. I recommend Shklovsky’s book so that there are no unnecessary illusions.

The collapse of society is always scary and fraught with a huge number of deaths. Most people in civilian life died not from atrocities and executions, but from hunger and infectious diseases. Simply due to the collapse of the relevant life support systems. But people then lived much more autonomously - they had their own wells and toilets in their gardens, grew potatoes behind the house and did not use electricity.

Shklovsky describes everything accurately and calmly, without imposing any conclusions. Detached - as he loved. His political views were then vaguely moderate, the Bolsheviks - the only ones who at that time had their own metaphysical goal that went beyond the boundaries of the old world, which boiled down to the redistribution of power and property - were clearly incomprehensible to him and he described them as aliens, unknown creatures.

Some pages of the book seem to have been written today. A very useful read - after all, the current authorities of Russia (historical Russia) have clearly set a course for the reconstruction of that time - which means that not only 1913, but also 1918 will be reconstructed. Only without the Bolsheviks, who no longer exist. We've run out.

And another moral follows from what I read: when change is inevitable, it will happen sooner or later. Only the price will be very different. Pressure on the current government in order to force it to do something useful will cost much less than a revolution that will overthrow not only it, but also all the structures of everyday life.

Before the revolution, the author worked as an instructor in a reserve armored battalion. In February 1917, he and his battalion arrived at the Tauride Palace. The revolution saved him, like other reserves, from many months of tedious and humiliating sitting in the barracks. In this he saw (and he saw and understood everything in his own way) the main reason for the quick victory of the revolution in the capital.

The democracy that reigned in the army put forward Shklovsky, a supporter of continuing the war, which he now likened to wars French Revolution, to the post of assistant commissioner of the Western Front. A student of the Faculty of Philology who did not complete the course, a futurist, a curly-haired young man, resembling Danton in Repin’s drawing, is now in the center historical events. He sits together with the caustic and arrogant democrat Savinkov, expresses his opinion to the nervous, broken Kerensky, going to the front, visits General Kornilov (at that time society was tormented by doubts about which of them was better suited to the role of Bonaparte of the Russian revolution). Impression from the front: the Russian army had a hernia before the revolution, but now it simply cannot walk. Despite the selfless activity of Commissar Shklovsky, which included a military feat, rewarded St. George's Cross from the hands of Kornilov (attack on the Lomnitsa River, under fire in front of the regiment, wounded right through in the stomach), it becomes clear that the Russian army is incurable without surgical intervention. After the decisive failure of the Kornilov dictatorship, Bolshevik vivisection becomes inevitable.

Now longing was calling me somewhere to the outskirts - I got on the train and went. To Persia, again as a commissioner of the Provisional Government in the Russian expeditionary corps. Fighting with the Turks near Lake Urmia, where Russian troops are mainly located, has not been fought for a long time. The Persians are in poverty and hunger, and the local Kurds, Armenians and Aisors (descendants of the Assyrians) are busy slaughtering each other. Shklovsky is on the side of the Isors, simple-minded, friendly and few in number. Ultimately, after October 1917, the Russian army was withdrawn from Persia. The author (sitting on the roof of the carriage) returns to his homeland through the south of Russia, which by that time was replete with all types of nationalism.

In St. Petersburg, Shklovsky is interrogated by the Cheka. He, a professional storyteller, tells about Persia, and he is released. Meanwhile, the need to fight the Bolsheviks for Russia and for freedom seems obvious. Shklovsky heads the armored department of the underground organization of supporters of the Constituent Assembly (Socialist Revolutionaries). However, the performance is postponed. The struggle is expected to continue in the Volga region, but nothing is happening in Saratov either. He does not like underground work, and he goes to the fantastic Ukrainian-German Kyiv of Hetman Skoropadsky. He does not want to fight for the Germanophile hetman against Petliura and disables the armored cars that were entrusted to him (with an experienced hand he pours sugar into the jets). News arrives of Kolchak's arrest of members of the Constituent Assembly. The fainting that happened to Shklovsky at this news meant the end of his struggle with the Bolsheviks. There was no more strength. Nothing could be stopped. Everything was rolling on rails. He came to Moscow and capitulated. The Cheka again released him as a good friend of Maxim Gorky. There was a famine in St. Petersburg, my sister died, my brother was shot by the Bolsheviks. He went south again, and in Kherson, during the White advance, he was mobilized into the Red Army. He was a demolition specialist. One day a bomb exploded in his hands. He survived, visited relatives, ordinary Jews in Elisavetgrad, and returned to St. Petersburg. After they began to judge the Socialist Revolutionaries for their past struggle with the Bolsheviks, he suddenly noticed that he was being followed. He did not return home and went on foot to Finland. Then he came to Berlin. From 1917 to 1922, in addition to the above, he married a woman named Lucy (this book is dedicated to her), fought a duel because of another woman, went hungry a lot, worked with Gorky in World Literature, lived in the House arts (in the then main writers' barracks, located in the palace of the merchant Eliseev), taught literature, published books, and together with friends created a very influential scientific school. During his wanderings he carried books with him. Again he taught Russian writers to read Stern, who once (in the 18th century) was the first to write “A Sentimental Journey.” He explained how the novel “Don Quixote” works and how many other literary and non-literary things work. I successfully quarreled with many people. Lost my brown curls. The portrait of the artist Yuri Annensky shows an overcoat, a huge forehead, and an ironic smile. I remained optimistic.

Once I met a shoe shiner, an old acquaintance of the Aisor Lazar Zervandov, and wrote down his story about the exodus of the Aisors from Northern Persia to Mesopotamia. I put it in my book as an excerpt. heroic epic. In St. Petersburg at this time, people of Russian culture were tragically experiencing a catastrophic change; the era was expressively defined as the time of the death of Alexander Blok. This is also in the book, this also appears as a tragic epic. Genres were changing. But the fate of Russian culture, the fate of the Russian intelligentsia appeared with inevitable clarity. The theory seemed clear. Craft constituted culture, craft determined destiny.

On May 20, 1922 in Finland, Shklovsky wrote: “When you fall like a stone, you don’t need to think, when you think, you don’t need to fall. I mixed two crafts.”

That same year in Berlin, he ends the book with the names of those who are worthy of their craft, those to whom their craft does not leave the opportunity to kill and do mean things.

Retold

Before the revolution, the author worked as an instructor in a reserve armored battalion. In February 1977, he and his battalion arrived at the Tauride Palace. The revolution saved him
like other reserves, from months of tedious and humiliating sitting in the barracks. In this he saw (and he saw and understood everything in his own way) the main reason for the quick victory of the revolution in the capital. The democracy that reigned in the army nominated Shklovsky, a supporter of continuing the war, which he now likened to the wars of the French Revolution, to the post of assistant commissar of the Western Front. A student of the Faculty of Philology who did not complete the course, a futurist, a curly-haired young man, who in Repin’s drawing resembles Danton, is now at the center of historical events. He sits with the sarcastic and arrogant democrat Savinkov, expresses his opinion to the nervous,
the broken Kerensky, going to the front, visits General Kornilov (society was once tormented by doubts about which of them was better suited to the role of Bonaparte of the Russian revolution).
Impression from the front: the Russian army had a hernia before the revolution, but now it simply cannot walk. Despite the selfless activity of Commissar Shklovsky, which included a military feat rewarded with the St. George Cross from the hands of Kornilov (attack on the Lomnitsa River, under fire in front of the regiment, wounded right through in the stomach), it becomes clear that the Russian army is incurable without surgical intervention. After the decisive failure of the Kornilov dictatorship, Bolshevik vivisection became inevitable. Now longing called for somewhere on the outskirts - I got on the train and went. To Persia, again as a commissioner of the Provisional Government in the Russian expeditionary corps. Fighting with the Turks near Lake Urmia, where Russian troops are mainly located, has not been fought for a long time. The Persians are in poverty and hunger, the local Kurds, Armenians and Aysors (descendants of the Assyrians) are busy slaughtering each other. Shklovsky is on the side of the Isors, simple-minded, friendly and few in number. Ultimately, after October 1917, the Russian army was withdrawn from Persia. The author (sitting on the roof of the carriage) returns to his homeland through the south of Russia, which by that time was replete with all types of nationalism. In St. Petersburg, Shklovsky is interrogated by the Cheka. He, a professional storyteller, tells about Persia, and is released. Meanwhile, the need to fight the Bolsheviks for Russia and for freedom seems obvious. Shklovsky heads the armored department of the underground organization of supporters of the Constituent Assembly (Socialist Revolutionaries). However, the performance is postponed. The struggle is expected to continue in the Volga region, but nothing is happening in Saratov either. He does not like underground work, and he goes to the fantastic Ukrainian-German Kyiv of Hetman Skoropadsky.
He does not want to fight for the Germanophile hetman against Petliura and disables the armored cars that were entrusted to him (with an experienced hand he pours sugar into the jets). News arrives of Kolchak's arrest of members of the Constituent Assembly. The fainting that happened to Shklovsky at this news meant the end of his struggle with the Bolsheviks. There was no more strength. Nothing could be stopped. Everything was rolling along the rails. He came to Moscow and capitulated. The Cheka again released him as a good friend of Maxim Gorky. There was a famine in St. Petersburg, my sister died, my brother was shot by the Bolsheviks. I went south again
in Kherson, during the White advance, he was already mobilized into the Red Army. He was a demolition specialist. One day a bomb exploded in his hands. Survived, visited relatives,
Jewish inhabitants in Elisavetgrad, returned to St. Petersburg. After they began to judge the Socialist Revolutionaries for their past struggle with the Bolsheviks, he suddenly noticed that he was being followed. He didn’t return home and went on foot to Finland. Then he came to Berlin. From 1917 to 1922, in addition to the above, he married a woman named Lucy (this book is dedicated to her), fought a duel because of another woman, went hungry a lot, worked with Gorky in World Literature, lived in the House of Arts ( in the then main writers' barracks, located in the palace of the merchant Eliseev), taught literature, published books, and together with his friends created a very influential scientific school. During his wanderings he carried books with him. Again he taught Russian writers to read Stern, who once (in the 18th century) was the first to write “A Sentimental Journey”. He explained how the novel “Don Quixote” works and how many other literary and non-literary things work. I successfully quarreled with many people. I lost my chestnut curls. The portrait of the artist Yuri Annensky shows an overcoat, a huge forehead, and an ironic smile. He remained an optimist. One day he met a shoe shiner, an old acquaintance of the Aisor Lazar Zervandov, and wrote down his story about the exodus of the Aisors from Northern Persia to Mesopotamia. I placed it in my book as an excerpt from a heroic epic. In St. Petersburg at this time, people of Russian culture were tragically experiencing a catastrophic change; the era was expressively defined as the time of the death of Alexander Blok.
This is also in the book, this also appears as a tragic epic. Genres were changing. But the fate of Russian culture, the fate of the Russian intelligentsia appeared with inevitable clarity. The theory also seemed clear. Craft constituted culture, craft determined fate. On May 20, 1922, in Finland, Shklovsky wrote: “When you fall like a stone, you don’t need to think, when you think,
then there is no need to fall. I mixed two crafts.” In the same year in Berlin, he ends the book with the names of those who are worthy of their craft, those to whom their craft does not leave the opportunity to kill and do mean things.

Victor Borisovich Shklovsky

Before the revolution, I worked as an instructor in a reserve armored division - I was in a privileged position as a soldier.

I will never forget the feeling of that terrible oppression that I and my brother, who served as a staff clerk, experienced.

I remember the thieves’ run down the street after 8 o’clock and the three-month hopeless sitting in the barracks, and most importantly, the tram.

The city was turned into a military camp. “Semishniki” - that was the name of the soldiers of the military patrols because they, it was said, received two kopecks for each arrest - they caught us, drove us into the courtyards, and filled the commandant’s office. The reason for this war was the overcrowding of tram cars with soldiers and the refusal of soldiers to pay for travel.

The authorities considered this question a matter of honor. We, the mass of soldiers, responded to them with dull, embittered sabotage.

Maybe this is childishness, but I am sure that sitting without vacation in the barracks, where people taken away and cut off from work were rotting on bunks without anything to do, the melancholy of the barracks, the dark languor and anger of the soldiers at the fact that they were hunted in the streets - all this revolutionized the St. Petersburg garrison more than constant military failures and persistent, general talk about “treason.”

Special folklore, pitiful and characteristic, was created on tram themes. For example: a sister of mercy travels with the wounded, the general becomes attached to the wounded, insults his sister; then she takes off her cloak and finds herself in a uniform Grand Duchess; That’s what they said: “in uniform.” The general kneels and asks for forgiveness, but she does not forgive him. As you can see, folklore is still completely monarchical.

This story is attached either to Warsaw or to St. Petersburg.

It was told about the murder of a general by a Cossack who wanted to drag the Cossack off the tram and tore off his crosses. The murder over the tram, it seems, really happened in St. Petersburg, but I attribute the general to an epic treatment; At that time, generals did not yet ride trams, with the exception of retired poor people.

There was no agitation in the units; at least I can say this about my unit, where I spent all the time with the soldiers from five or six in the morning until the evening. I'm talking about party propaganda; but even in its absence, the revolution was somehow decided - they knew that it would happen, they thought that it would break out after the war.

There was no one to agitate in the units; there were few party people; if there were any, it was among the workers who had almost no connection with the soldiers; intelligentsia - in the most primitive sense of the word, i.e.<о>e<сть>everyone who had any education, at least two classes of a gymnasium, was promoted to officer and behaved, at least in the St. Petersburg garrison, no better, and perhaps worse, than regular officers; The ensign was not popular, especially the rear one, who clung his teeth to the reserve battalion. The soldiers sang about him:

Before, I was digging in the garden,

Now - your honor.

Of these people, many are only to blame for the fact that they too easily succumbed to the superbly choreographed drill of military schools. Many of them were subsequently sincerely devoted to the cause of the revolution, although they succumbed to its influence just as easily as they had previously easily become obsessed.

The story of Rasputin was widespread. I don't like this story; in the way it was told, the spiritual rotting of the people was visible. Post-revolutionary leaflets, all these “Grishka and his affairs” and the success of this literature showed me that for the very broad masses Rasputin was a unique national hero, something like Vanka the Keymaster.

But for various reasons, some of which directly scratched the nerves and created a reason for an outbreak, while others acted from within, slowly changing the psyche of the people, the rusty, iron hoops that held together the mass of Russia became tense.

The city's food supply kept getting worse; by the standards of that time it became bad. There was a shortage of bread, the bread shops had their tails, the shops on the Obvodny Canal had already begun to break down, and those lucky ones who managed to get the bread carried it home, holding it tightly in their hands, looking at it lovingly.

They bought bread from the soldiers; crusts and pieces disappeared from the barracks, which previously represented, along with the sour smell of captivity, the “local signs” of the barracks.

The cry of “bread” was heard under the windows and at the gates of the barracks, already poorly guarded by sentries and guards on duty, who freely let their comrades into the street.

The barracks, having lost faith in the old system, pressed by the cruel, but already uncertain hand of the authorities, wandered. By this time, a career soldier, and indeed a soldier between 22 and 25 years old, was a rarity. He was brutally and senselessly killed in the war.

Career non-commissioned officers were poured into the first echelons as ordinary privates and died in Prussia, near Lvov and during the famous “great” retreat, when the Russian army paved the entire earth with its corpses. The St. Petersburg soldier of those days was a dissatisfied peasant or a dissatisfied layman.

These people, not even dressed in gray overcoats, but simply hastily wrapped in them, were brought together into crowds, gangs and gangs, called reserve battalions.

In essence, the barracks became just brick pens, into which herds of human flesh were herded with more and more green and red draft papers.

The numerical ratio of command personnel to the mass of soldiers was, in all likelihood, no higher than that of overseers to slaves on slave ships.

And outside the walls of the barracks there were rumors that “the workers are going to speak out,” that “the Kolpino residents want to go to the State Duma on February 18.”

The half-peasant, half-philistine mass of soldiers had few connections with the workers, but all the circumstances developed in such a way that they created the possibility of some detonation.

I remember the days before. Dreamy conversations between instructor-drivers that it would be nice to steal an armored car, shoot at the police, and then abandon the armored car somewhere behind the outpost and leave a note on it: “Deliver to the Mikhailovsky Manege.” Very characteristic: car care remains. Obviously, people were not yet confident that it was possible to overthrow the old system; they just wanted to make some noise. And they had been angry with the police for a long time, mainly because they were exempt from serving at the front.

I remember two weeks before the revolution, we, walking as a team (about two hundred people), hooted at a detachment of policemen and shouted: “Pharaohs, pharaohs!”

IN last days February, the people were literally eager to fight the police; detachments of Cossacks, sent out into the streets, drove around without bothering anyone, laughing good-naturedly. This greatly raised the rebellious mood of the crowd. They shot at Nevsky Prospect, killed several people, and the dead horse lay for a long time near the corner of Liteiny. I remembered it, it was unusual then.

On Znamenskaya Square, a Cossack killed a bailiff who hit a demonstrator with a saber.

There were hesitant patrols on the streets. I remember a confused machine-gun team with small machine guns on wheels (Sokolov’s machine gun), with machine-gun belts on the horses’ packs; obviously some kind of pack-machine-gun team. She stood on Basseynaya, corner of Baskovaya Street; the machine gun, like a small animal, pressed against the pavement, also embarrassed, a crowd surrounded him, not attacking, but somehow pressing with his shoulder, armless.

On Vladimirsky there were patrols of the Semenovsky regiment - Cain's reputation.

The patrols stood hesitantly: “We are nothing, we are like others.” The huge coercive apparatus prepared by the government was stalled. That night the Volynians could not stand it, they came to an agreement, at the command “to pray” they rushed to their rifles, destroyed the armory, took cartridges, ran out into the street, joined several small teams standing around, and set up patrols in the area of ​​their barracks - in the Liteiny part. By the way, the Volynians destroyed our guardhouse, located next to their barracks. The released prisoners reported to their superiors; Our officers assumed neutrality; they were also in a kind of opposition to “Evening Time”. The barracks was noisy and was waiting for them to drive her out into the street. Our officers said: “Do what you know.”