Eugene Bogat - ... What moves the sun and the luminaries. Love in the letters of prominent people

Evgeny Mikhailovich Rich

... What moves the sun and the luminaries. Love in the letters of prominent people

MARIANA ALCAFORADO - CHEVALIER DE CHAMILLY

… Can I ever be free from suffering until I see you? Meanwhile, I bear them meekly, because they come from you. What? Is this not the reward you give me for loving you so dearly? But come what may, I have resolved to adore you all my life and never see anyone, and I assure you that you will do well if you love no one. Could you be satisfied with a passion less fervent than mine? You will perhaps find a more beautiful lover (meanwhile you once told me that I was quite beautiful), but you will never find such a love, and everything else is nothing. Do not fill your letters with unnecessary things anymore and do not write to me anymore so that I remember you. I can't forget you...

I implore you to tell me why you were so determined to bewitch me, as you did when you knew you would have to leave me? And why are you so hardened in your desire to make me unhappy? Why didn't you leave me alone in my monastery? Have I offended you in any way? But I ask your forgiveness; I place no blame on you: I am unable to think of revenge, and I blame only the severity of my fate. I think that by separating us, she did us all the harm that we could fear; she cannot tear our hearts apart; love, which is more powerful than her, united them for all our lives. If this love of mine is not completely indifferent to you, write to me often. I truly deserve that you take some care to keep me informed of the state of your heart and your affairs.

The woman who wrote this probably never existed, although generations of readers have believed in the authenticity of her letters for three centuries. Meticulous literary scholars have recently established that, indeed, in the 17th century, a certain Maria Anna Alcaforado was in one of the Portuguese monasteries, but love letters were not written by her, but by a half-forgotten writer, diplomat, wit Guilleragom.

... Since you left, I have not been healthy for a single moment, and my only pleasure was to pronounce your name a thousand times a day; some of the nuns, knowing the deplorable state in which I am immersed by you, speak to me about you very often; I try to leave my cell as little as possible, where I saw you so often, and I constantly look at your portrait, which is a thousand times more precious to me than life, it gives me a little joy; but it also gives me much grief when I think that I may never see you again. Have you left me forever?

Wasn't there this love, this longing, this tenderness and need for understanding?! And before us is a talented literary hoax, a joke?!

I am writing to you for the last time, and I hope to make you feel, by the difference in expressions and by the very spirit of this letter, that you have at last convinced me that you have ceased to love me, and that therefore it is not proper for me to love you any more. So, I will send you at the first opportunity what I have left of you. Do not be afraid that I will write to you; I won't even put your name on the package...

ELOISE TO ABELARU

You wrote your friend a long message of consolation, though about his troubles, but about your own. Remembering them in detail with the intention of comforting a friend, you further increased our longing. Wishing to heal his pain, you inflicted new ones on us and inflamed the old bitter wounds. I beg you, heal this malady caused by yourself, since you already relieve the pain from the wounds inflicted by others. You acted as a friend and comrade and gave a debt of friendship and camaraderie.

Think about how great a debt you have before me personally: after all, the debt that you have pledged to all women in general, you must pay even more zealously to me, your only one.

O my beloved! All of us know how much I have lost in you.

... You possessed two qualities that could captivate any woman, namely, the talents of a poet and a singer. These qualities, as far as we know, other philosophers did not possess at all.

As if jokingly, in a moment of rest from philosophical studies, you composed and left many love poems beautiful in form, and they were so pleasant both in words and in tune that they were often repeated by everyone, and your name constantly sounded on everyone’s lips; the sweetness of your melodies did not allow even uneducated people to forget you. This is what you most of all encouraged women to sigh from love for you. And since our love was sung in most of these songs, I soon became known in many areas and aroused the envy of many women. What beautiful spiritual and bodily qualities did not adorn your youth! What woman, even though she was then my envious, my misfortune will not induce me to pity me, deprived of such pleasures? What man or woman, even though they used to be my enemies, will not soften out of compassion for me?

The authenticity of this letter is indisputable: there was Eloise, a wonderful woman, there was Abelard, a freethinker philosopher, and there was their love.

... My soul was not with me, but with you! Even now, if she is not with you, then she is not anywhere: truly, without you, my soul cannot exist in any way.

But, I beg you, make her feel good with you. And she will be well with you if she finds you favorable, if you repay love with love, and let a few reward for much, even if with words for deeds. Oh, if, my dear, your affection for me were not steel sure, you would take care of me more! And now, the more confident you are in me, as a result of my efforts, the more I am forced to endure your inattention to me.

What can I hope for if I lose you?

What can I hope for if I lose you, and what can still keep me in this earthly wandering, where I have no consolation except you, and this consolation is only in the fact that you are alive, for all other joys come from you are not available to me...

Her earthly wandering began at the very dawn of the 12th century: in the year either 1100 or 1101 is not exactly established. And absolutely nothing is known to us about her parents and her childhood, only the name of the monastery where she studied Latin and the wisdom of the ancient classics, Argenteuil, and the name of the uncle who adopted her, Fulber, came down. But if its first seventeen years are dissolved in the twilight of dawn, then the details of the amazing decades that followed, starting from the hour when Master Abelard settled in the house of the Parisian canon Fulber, who wished to teach philosophy to the young niece of the canon Eloise, have been hurting human hearts for almost a millennium. Abelard himself was then forty; he was smart, educated, fearless and slate, like no one else in France; his disputes with the orthodoxies of the Catholic Church were remembered as, fifteen hundred years earlier, in Athens, the conversations of Socrates, whom Abelard held in high esteem; in order to learn from the incomparable master the subtle art of dialectical thinking, young men, leaving their homeland, family, lovers, were drawn to Paris from the farthest outskirts of Europe ...

Milena ARUTYUNOVA

What moves the sun and luminaries

"L'amor che muove it sole e l'altre stelle" - these words ended one of the evenings of the cycle "Days of Italian Culture in Moscow", organized by the Italian Institute of Culture and the Theater Museum. A.A. Bakhrushin. Concerts "Dante - Liszt" in the House-Museum of M.N. Yermolova, on Tverskoy, aroused extraordinary public interest.

"Love that moves the sun and luminaries" is the last line of Dante's Divine Comedy. That is what the grateful listener takes with him.

“Our meetings will continue,” says Angelica Carpifave, head of the Italian cultural representation in Russia. – Of course, we will work on this project further. Its essence is to combine literature and music.

Much has been said in the 20th century about the polyphony of a literary text. The polyphony of an actor's word is a thing, it seems, for granted. But reincarnation is one thing, and quite another is the polyphony of the overt and hidden voices of Dante's masterpiece. It's like a one-voice instrument would start playing Bach's four-voice fugue. Incredible! Nevertheless, four passages from Dante (Hell 3, Hell 5, Purgatory 2, Paradise 33), performed by the Roman actor-reciter Walter Maestosi, left just such an impression. One figure of the thousand-year-old elder Virgil is worth something! Even a listener not at all experienced in Italian could easily distinguish him from Dante and from the shadows of sinners.

After the concert, as if reading the thoughts of an astonished Russian listener, the actor tells us the story of his relationship with Dante: “In the 60s, I began working in the theater and on television. He worked a lot on the radio, acted in films. And then he decided to devote himself to poetry. I spent about eight years studying The Divine Comedy. I remember Dante from school. But our teachers made it terribly boring. After all, they sorted out the meanings, and somehow left poetry aside. For us, fifteen or sixteen-year-old boys, it was too heavy. I discovered Dante only many years later. God, what music! I worked through Dante's text as a musical score. Is it possible, bypassing the instrumental side of Dante's poetry, to go straight to the meaning?

Next to Maestosi, pianist Roberto Prosseda is the apotheosis of youth and strength, a musician with an extraordinary flair for romantic emotion. “In my practice, I already had a similar experience,” he answers the question of how the idea of joint performances was born. - I had to play in concerts with a literary program, for example, dedicated to Petrarch. The projects were very different, but the combination "Dante - Liszt" always seemed especially fertile. In such line-up as today, we performed for the first time. I do not consider myself an adherent of any particular musical repertoire, but, of course, I turn to romantic music most often - Chopin, Schubert. It is with great pleasure that I play the music of Italian composers of the 20th century: Petrassi, Vacca, Solbiati.”

Roberto Prosseda is not yet thirty years old, but he is the owner of numerous awards: at a competition in Milan, Schubert - in Dortmund, Mozart - in Salzburg ...

And what Days of Italian Culture can do without singing? The range of the young vocalist Daniela Barra, by her own admission, ranges from modern popular song to the old Italian vocal repertoire of the 14th century. Although her current performance is not directly related to Dante, the idea to involve her in joint Dante projects has already matured - for example, Dante and the Gregorian chant, in general, the vocal trecento. The pianist and composer Giovanni Monti closes the troupe of Roman artists.

It is impossible not to note the amazing thoughtfulness of the whole, as well as the performing tact that united all participants in the program. Love for the beautiful, for creativity, for what is created and created - this is the language that they all know and to which they introduced the Russian listener.

To be fair, the idea of reciting poetic texts in the original language was extremely risky, and here only the devastating talent of Walter Maestosi could cope with such a task.

It is difficult to say who is more musical: Liszt or Dante? To follow the overflowing instrumentation of Dante's verse, its alliterations, the repetitions that organize the sound flow is in itself an incomparable pleasure. Dante encourages the performer to play music, to sing, while Liszt's rigid drawing rather requires recitation. And this last thing Prosseda succeeds amazingly with every touch of the clavier. No wonder they wrote about him that "Prosseda philosophizes at the clavier."

The idea of the evenings "Dante - Liszt" is based on explicit and hidden semantic echoes and analogies between the works of the great poet of the Renaissance and the romantic composer, who, as you know, had a great inclination towards the culture of Italy, which eventually became his last homeland. And the listener received it with enthusiasm.

Evgeny Mikhailovich Rich

... What moves the sun and the luminaries. Love in the letters of prominent people

MARIANA ALCAFORADO - CHEVALIER DE CHAMILLY

Wasn't there this love, this longing, this tenderness and need for understanding?! And before us is a talented literary hoax, a joke?!

ELOISE TO ABELARU

Think about how great a debt you have before me personally: after all, the debt that you have pledged to all women in general, you must pay even more zealously to me, your only one.

O my beloved! All of us know how much I have lost in you.

... You possessed two qualities that could captivate any woman, namely, the talents of a poet and a singer. These qualities, as far as we know, other philosophers did not possess at all.

The authenticity of this letter is indisputable: there was Eloise, a wonderful woman, there was Abelard, a freethinker philosopher, and there was their love.

... My soul was not with me, but with you! Even now, if she is not with you, then she is not anywhere: truly, without you, my soul cannot exist in any way.

What can I hope for if I lose you?

Who even among the kings and philosophers could equal you in glory? What country, city or village did not burn with the desire to see you?

Abelard deceived Canon Fulber: he secretly fell in love with Eloisa even before he settled in his house. And he became not her teacher, but her lover. Later, when fate dealt him more blows than the wisest and strongest could withstand, he found enough sincerity in himself to write about those days: “Hands more often reached for the body than for books, and eyes more often reflected love than followed behind the written.

Now he wrote not philosophical treatises, but love poems: they were learned by knights and artisans, merchants, townspeople and townspeople and sung not only in Paris. It was a great love, natural and long-awaited, like a ball of the sun melting from within the heavy body of a thousand-year-old cloud.

At night, when Abelard slept peacefully, the people hired by Canon Fulber severely mutilated him.

Tell me, if you can, only one thing: why, after our tonsure, performed solely by your sole decision, you began to treat me so casually and inattentively that I can neither rest in a personal conversation with you, nor console myself when receiving letters from you ? Explain it to me, if you can, or I myself will express what I feel and what everyone already suspects.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is a huge figure standing on the border of two worlds: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This modest note is devoted not to his works, but to what is known worse - the fate of the artist.

Dante was born in a difficult time. Every baby in Florence was destined to become a member of one of two warring factions: the Guelphs or the Ghibellines. Guelphs are influential citizens of Florence, merchants, bankers, lawyers, trying to defend their independence, both financial and political. Their activities were connected with Rome, Naples, France. The desire for independence meant a desire to limit the power of the emperor and increase the influence of the pope. The Ghibellines, on the contrary, were adherents of the imperial power. The fight against the Guelphs was essentially a fight between the papacy and the empire.

Dante's house in Florence

Little is known about Dante's family. These are middle-class people who own land in Florence. Dante's father was a lawyer and was married twice. His first wife - Dante's mother - died when he was a child. Her name was Bella (or Isabella). When Dante was 18 years old, his father died. The poet too early became the head of the family. He may have studied at the law school in Bologna. He did not complete his university education.

At the age of nine, Dante met the beautiful Beatrice Portinari, who was also nine years old. On a May summer day, he admired the neighbor's daughter. This is his first memory. The name of Beatrice lit up his whole life. He not only loved her, it was a feeling of great depth, a reverent love. And that is why the grief experienced by Dante was so great when Beatrice, already a married woman, died at the age of 25. But nothing ends just like that. Her miraculous image, the beautiful face of the "glorified mistress of his memories" has become a symbol of the highest Wisdom, close to Revelation.

The image of a young and full of love beauty, full of regret for him, did not leave Dante and only intensified in his heart. It seems to him that the whole city is engulfed in this grief. Leaving this world, she goes to the realm of eternal rest - to the Empyrean. And there, “beyond the sphere of ultimate movement,” her face opens up to him: “She who has left the captivity of earthly anxieties, / Worthy of praise and surprise.”

We learn about Dante from one of his first biographers - Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375).

It cannot be assumed that Dante became a dreamy hermit. Boccaccio writes that shortly after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati. The marriage was predetermined by the parents (a well-known case when the husband and wife were still children). Gemma is never mentioned in Dante's works. Two sons were born: Pietro and Jacopo, the daughter of Anthony (after the death of Dante, she will become a monk under the name Beatrice).

Dante's grief gradually subsided. One day a beautiful young lady looked at him, condoling with him, and something new woke up in him, some kind of vague feeling, seeking a compromise with the past. He begins to convince himself that the same love lives in that beauty, which makes him shed tears. And every time she met him, she looked at him the same way, turning a little pale. It reminded him of Beatrice, who was just as pale. He looks at the stranger. If before her compassion brought tears to his eyes, now they are gone. He catches himself and reproaches himself for the unfaithfulness of his heart, he becomes even more painful and more ashamed. He dreams of Beatrice, dressed in the same way as on that warm day when he saw her as a girl ... And Dante returns to his old love with incredible passion, almost with a mystical affect. He will write when he sees the pilgrims: “If you stop and listen to me, then retire in tears; so tells me a longing heart. Florence has lost her Beatrice, and what a person can say about her will make everyone cry.

Love for Beatrice remained forever in him. Everything else was fleeting and insignificant. After her death, he will speak in the New Life about how he loved her. He will also say that this work is not enough to glorify her, and he will decide to create in her honor an unprecedented monument of the word. And therefore Dante works hard: he reads Boethius (“On the Consolation of Philosophy”), Cicero (“On Friendship”), visits the schools of monks, and expands the circle of his knowledge. The range of his thought covers the entire range of knowledge of mankind at the beginning of the XIV century, absorbs both ancient and medieval culture. This is a qualitatively different type of knowledge. A modern person cannot contain the vastness of the accumulated knowledge, and therefore the world for him crumbles into carefully studied, but fragments. Knowledge goes not in breadth, but in depth. For Dante, the Universe is, on the contrary, a single whole, where everything is interconnected and justified, subordinated to a single idea and goal. Philosophy for Dante coincides with grief for Beatrice. But he lives in this world of sorrow, abstract categories and allegories. Remembering the beauty who sympathizes with him, he thinks: is it not in her that love is hidden that makes him suffer for Beatrice?

At this time, political strife rages in Florence. Among the Guelph nobility there was a skirmish - between Donati (Black Party) and Cherki (White Party). Blood was shed and all the Guelph nobility split into two camps. Blacks are at one with the pope, who wants to subjugate Florence, and Whites are their worst enemies, trying to protect the independence of their homeland. Dante joins the Whites precisely because he considered it his duty to defend the independence of Florence, the right of the people to vote. Since 1295, his name has been on the lists of various government councils, and in 1300 he was sent to San Gimignano as an envoy for negotiations.

The government of Florence sent some members of both the Black and White camps into exile, among them Dante's best friend, Guido Cavalcanti. He was exiled among the Whites to Sarzana, some unhealthy area, where Guido fell seriously ill and died the same year, despite the fact that he returned from there in the autumn.

Guido Cavalcanti (1250-1300)

Dante continued to speak at council meetings as an opponent of the pope. But power passed to the Blacks. Lists of those to be exiled began to be drawn up. The list of 1302 included the name of Dante Alighieri. He was accused of everything that is possible (extortion, malfeasance, etc.). The verdict is a huge fine and a two-year exile from Toksana with a ban on holding public office. All of Dante's property was confiscated. The house was about to be destroyed. The news reached him while he was in Rome. He was no longer able to return to Florence. A few months later, a new decree followed, in which his name again appeared along with fourteen others: in case of capture, sentence him to be burned at the stake: "... let them burn him with fire until he dies."

Until the end of his life, Dante lived as an exile. This is twenty years of his life, the time in which he creates the "Divine Comedy". He lives with the ruler of Verona, Bartolomeo della Scala; lived in Bologna, the city of scientists; traveled to Paris, where he studied theology and philosophy (1308-1309).

He sadly recalls Italy, torn apart by confrontations. It seems to him that everyone is wandering in delusions, in the dark thickets of the forest, like himself in the first song of the Divine Comedy, and the same symbolic animals blocked the path to the light for everyone: the panther is voluptuousness; lion - pride; wolf - covetousness. The latter is especially numerous around. At the same time, the paths of personal salvation are open to everyone: reason, self-knowledge, science - all this leads a person to the clarification of the truth, to faith, divine grace and, finally, love. And Beatrice becomes a symbol of this active grace. The voice of reason and science is assigned to Virgil.

The fate of Dante is similar to the fate of Shakespeare and the fate of Pushkin. Apparently, this is a typology of geniuses. Yes, in the XIV century, Dante's creations were enthusiastically received by advanced contemporaries. But what happened in the literary consciousness of subsequent eras? In the era of classicism and enlightenment philosophy, his name was almost forgotten. For example, Voltaire recognized some of the merits of the works of Shakespeare and Dante, but this did not prevent him from calling the first a drunken savage, and speaking about the “Divine Comedy” of the second as an ugly product of the Middle Ages, barbaric Gothic taste.

Voltaire's reasoning about "Hamlet": "It seems that this work is the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage" ("Discourse on the tragedy of ancient and modern").

The exiled Pushkin in exile makes a note about Dante, namely, he recalls the words that the artist put into the mouth of Francesca in Inferno, reflecting the sorrowful experiences of both Dante and Pushkin himself: “There is no more torment than remembering happy times in misfortune days” ). (Later, Ryleev would take these same lines as an epigraph to the poem "Voynarovsky".) The episode of Dante's meeting with the shadows of Francesca and Paolo in the fifth song of "Hell" deeply sunk into Pushkin's memory. To "Eugene Onegin" he makes an epigraph from Dante: "But tell me: in the days of tender sighs / By what signs and how did Cupid allow, / So that you would know your obscure desires?".

Dante's torments were illuminated until the end of his life by the light of Beatrice. He fell asleep thinking about her, “like a tearful beaten baby” (“New Life”, XII, 2-3). In a playful sonnet addressed to Guido Cavalcanti, he paints a picture: “I wish that by some magic we found ourselves, you, and Lapo, and I, on a ship that would go in every wind, wherever we wish, not fearing neither storm nor bad weather, and the desire to be together would constantly grow in us. I would like the good wizard to plant with us both Monna Vanna (Giovanna), and Monna Bice (Beatrice), and the one who stands at our number thirtieth, and we would talk forever about love, and they would be satisfied, and how pleased we would be!” But this is just a playful form of love. For Dante, love was filled with more important meanings.

When he thought about the voice of his heart, he saw Beatrice no longer in the company of cheerful poets - she becomes a spiritualized ghost, "the young sister of angels", they are waiting for her in heaven. The Lord, who knows what they say about Madonna Beatrice, answers: “My dears, wait calmly, let your hope remain for the time being, according to my will, where someone is afraid of losing it, who will say to sinners in hell: I saw the hope of the blessed ". In this excerpt from the New Life, the moods of the yet uncreated Divine Comedy "flicker" - in the very pathos of Beatrice's idealization.

When she died, Dante was inconsolable. He remembers her, and these memories drown out the whole world. This world seems to be "lost" in her image, in the numbers 3 and 9, in prophetic visions... Dying, Dante thinks about her: he already sees himself next to Beatrice, closes his eyes, he starts delirium. There, somewhere on the other side of the universe, he sees women with loose hair, who tell him: you will also die! They whisper to him: you are dead. The delirium intensifies, Dante no longer knows if he sees the real world. Then go the grief-stricken women, they cry, the stars shine dimly above them: the stars also cry and shed tears, the birds fall dead in mid-flight ... Someone passes by and says: don't you know anything? Your sweetheart has left this world. And Dante is crying too. A host of angels appears, rushing to heaven with the words: "Hosanna in the highest." It seems to him that he follows them to look at her. Women cover Beatrice with a white veil, her face is calm, she contemplates the source of the world. This is New Life:

And delirium let me
See the Madonna's face transformed;
And I saw how donna
His veil was covered with white cloth;
And indeed her appearance was meek,
As if broadcasting: “I have tasted the world!”

Finally, he sees Beatrice in heaven:

Beatrice shines in the heavenly sky,
Where the angels taste the sweetness of days;
She left you for them, donnas, -
Carried away not by the deadly cold,
We do not know the heat that kills people,
But with its unsurpassed goodness.

Sandro Botticelli "Meeting of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise"

Getting to Heaven, Dante flies next to Beatrice. Ascending to the Empyrean, he sees only her face, her eyes, because she is in front of him. Everything else loses its former meaning, turning into the Upper Light:

But Beatrice was so beautiful
And glad that it's recreated
My memory has no power.

In her strength I found my eyes to lift
And I saw that with her instantly
I ascended to the highest grace.

Literature

Blagoy D.D. Pushkin and Dante // Dante Readings. M.: Nauka, 1973. S. 9.
Veselovsky A. N. Dante // Encyclopedic Dictionary. Brockhaus and Efron. Biographies. T. 4. M., 1993. S. 535-540.
Golenishchev-Kutuzov I. N. Creativity of Dante and world culture. Moscow: Nauka, 1985.
Dobrokhotov A.L. Dante Alighieri. M.: Thought, 1990.
Lozinsky M. L. Dante Alighieri // Dante's Readings. M.: Nauka, 1985. S. 35.
Tahoe-Godi E. A. Dante in the works, lectures and prose of A.F. Losev // Dante Readings. M., 2002. S. 63-76.

Evgeny Mikhailovich Rich

... What moves the sun and the luminaries. Love in the letters of prominent people

PART I. ASCENT

MARIANA ALCAFORADO - CHEVALIER DE CHAMILLY

Wasn't there this love, this longing, this tenderness and need for understanding?! And before us is a talented literary hoax, a joke?!

ELOISE TO ABELARU

Think about how great a debt you have before me personally: after all, the debt that you have pledged to all women in general, you must pay even more zealously to me, your only one.

O my beloved! All of us know how much I have lost in you.

... You possessed two qualities that could captivate any woman, namely, the talents of a poet and a singer. These qualities, as far as we know, other philosophers did not possess at all.

The authenticity of this letter is indisputable: there was Eloise, a wonderful woman, there was Abelard, a freethinker philosopher, and there was their love.

... My soul was not with me, but with you! Even now, if she is not with you, then she is not anywhere: truly, without you, my soul cannot exist in any way.

What can I hope for if I lose you?