The prototype in A. Varlamov's novel "The Mental Wolf"

Nyu Yuetsyu Postgraduate student, Department of Russian Language and Literature, Far Eastern Federal University 690922, Russia, Vladivostok, Ajax str., 101007 nyu.yu@dvfu.ru Other publications by this author

The novel "The Mental Wolf" opens up a wide field for research, A. Latynina was one of the first to devote her critical article to the consideration of the characters, the biographical background of the novel, as well as understanding the historical concept ^[10]. Modern researchers consider the theme of revolution and the historical past in the novel ^{[9, 8]}). Ya's works are devoted to various aspects of the poetics of the novel. Soldatkina (A. Platonov's creative legacy in Varlamov's work) ^[13], V.I. Yerkin (about prototypes in the novel) ^[7]. The section of G.T. Garipova's research is devoted to understanding the novel from the point of view of "constructing special "mental"world images" ^[6]. V.A. Meskin correlated the plot-compositional structure and the motivic level of the text with the symbolist poetics of the early twentieth century – F. Sologub, V. Bryusov, but above all with the poetics of the author of "Petersburg" A. Bely ^[12].

The image system of the novel "The Mental Wolf" consists of both fictional and real characters. Among the latter there are heroes of A. Varlamov's biographical books: Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, Alexander Stepanovich Green and Grigory Efimovich Rasputin. The author brought them out under other names, but the prototypes are easy to guess: Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov is Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin, Alexander Stepanovich Savely Krud is Green, and Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin is a "peasant/elder/wanderer".

Considering the novel "The Mental Wolf" out of connection with the biographies written by Varlamov will significantly narrow the "horizon" of the reader's perception. After all, the author himself has repeatedly given the key to understanding the novel's idea in his interviews. For example, in the magazine "Russian language in the center of Europe. The Association of Russian Studies of Slovakia" published an interview in which Varlamov talks in detail about the reasons that prompted him to turn to the heroes of his biographies, but having already made them prototypes: "It turned out that I wrote biographies of writers, but I felt that there are quite a lot of things that do not fit in them. Because, from my point of view, biography is a very strict genre, there should be no speculation, admissions, everything is very strict and precise. And when you work with the material, there are also such vague, dubious things that are not fully understood. It's just that what doesn't fit into nonfiction prose, it can just be used in fiction. In this regard, I even came up with such a metaphor: the biographies that I have written are solid ground, and fog is spreading over this solid ground. And this Mental wolf is such a fog that creeps over my novels. It is very interesting to me in this fog, since I was able to say about the Silver Age and my heroes what I did not say in my biographies" ^{[15, p. 46]}. Varlamov provides the reader and researcher with a unique opportunity to observe how, on the basis of life material, historical reality, artistic reality is born, refracted in the mind of the artist of the word.

Pavel Matveyevich Legkobytov – Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin. The character, like his prototype, has a large family, his father died when they were still children, and his mother played an important role in the boys' lives. Pavel Matveyevich grew up in a poor family surrounded by four brothers – his mother raised five children alone: "... and the tears of Pavlusha's mother, who was actually poor and barely raised five children and was lying at his feet, begging to spare her son and condescend to her unfortunate situation" ^{[3, p. 66]}. Prishvin became an orphan at the age of eight, he hardly remembered his father, and the figure of his mother came to the fore for him: "Misha Prishvin knew his father quite a bit <...> She was widowed at the age of forty, Misha was orphaned at eight. He recalled about his father that he was a dreamy and inactive man <...> It so happened that women had a much greater influence on the boy..." ^{[4, pp. 11-13]}.

Admission to the gymnasium is another milestone in the coincidence of the biography of the prototype and the hero, it mentions studying there with Bunin ("classmate" in the novel), exclusion from the gymnasium: "I was a boy, a high school student <...> Ah, the neighbor [about Bunin] ... – Soft lips twitched contemptuously and opened brown teeth. – A classmate." The teacher of the gymnasium of the district is described in the novel as a negative character, bad relations develop between him and Pavel Matveevich, and it is the District that excludes Pavel Matveevich: "The gymnasium students treated the teacher with caution. No one knew in what mood the teacher would come to class <...> Well, I'll leave, but you'll run after me. Your lessons are over. <...> I am a half–educated student expelled from the gymnasium with a wolf ticket..." ^{[3, pp. 25-28]}. After graduating from rural school, Prishvin entered a gymnasium, but poor relations with teacher Rozanov led to his expulsion when he was in the fourth grade, as stated in Prishvin's biography, written by Varlamov: "In such a place, in the Yelets gymnasium, at one time they turned out (as after that do not believe in the non-randomness of everything that is happening in the world) at least three world–class personalities - Rozanov (as a teacher), Bunin and Prishvin… <...> My first encounter with him [Rozanov] was in 1883..." ^{[4, p. 16]}.

Prishvin's creative path was not quite straightforward, because he was an agronomist by education, and researchers have repeatedly emphasized that it was his profession that gave him a special view of nature. In the novel "The Mental Wolf" Varlamov writes: "Legkobytov was an agronomist by his first profession, but he did not grow anything in this field, except for a small book about garlic cultivation, and became first a journalist, and then a small writer" ^{[3, p. 9]}. In the biography "Prishvin" in the chapter "The main dates of M.M. Prishvin's life and work", the author wrote: "1903 – Work as an agronomist in the Klin Zemstvo of the Moscow province. 1905 – Work as an agronomist in Luga at the Zapolye experimental station and in the journal Experimental Agronomy ^{[4, p. 352]}.

It is interesting that Varlamov elaborated on the autobiographical background of the novels that his characters write – real and fictional. And here in the novel there is a curious motif of life as a text, as a creative action so important for the Silver Age. V. Khodasevich, a contemporary of the era of the Silver Age, who left valuable memories, says about the general attitude of the writers: "Here they tried to turn art into reality, and reality into art. Life events, due to the vagueness and shakiness of the lines that outlined reality for these people, were never experienced, as only life events; they immediately became part of the inner world and part of creativity. The opposite is true: what was written by anyone became a real, life event for everyone. Thus, both reality and literature were created as if by common, sometimes hostile, but also in hostility, united forces of all who fell into this extraordinary life, into this "symbolic dimension" ^{[14, p. 21]}. It is difficult to say whether Varlamov intentionally emphasized the moment of the transformation of life by Legkobytov or followed the prototype of the hero, but Pavel Matveevich's attempt to reinterpret the events of his life on the pages of his novel is clearly defined: "Starting with the fact that his little hero is not present at the death of his father, is not afraid of a corrupt woman in adolescence and is not expelled from the gymnasium with a wolf ticket, and he leaves it himself, wanders through Russia, through its secret abodes, learns its unknown people, law teachers, wanderers and fools, travels the world, goes to America, and then returns to St. Petersburg and defeats the apocalyptic hail with that secret knowledge that no one has" ^{[3, p. 58]}. In this regard, the text roll call with the biography of Prishvin is interesting: "... it is also remarkable that Asia has been chosen as the destination. – Why did you choose Asia for yourself, and not America?" ^{[4, p. 17]}. As we can see, these intertextual connections demonstrate Varlamov's author's attitude towards recreating the reality that he could not depict within the framework of a documentary biographical narrative. The novel "The Mental Wolf" is the answers to the questions that the author asked when writing a documentary biography, but the documentary did not allow to go beyond the historical and biographical reality, and the space of the artwork allows a free interpretation.

Biographical detail – training as an agronomist in Germany, the first love that did not lead to a relationship is described in both works. Prishvin met a beautiful girl and fell in love with her abroad: "It happened not in Yelets or in Russia at all, but in Germany, where Prishvin managed to leave and enroll in the agronomy department of the University of Leipzig <...> her father, Pyotr Nikolaevich Izmalkov, was a valid state councilor" ^{[4, pp. 46-47]}. Pavel Matveyevich met his first love when he was a student at the University of Leipzig in Berlin: "She is the daughter of a state councilor from St. Petersburg. We met in Berlin, at the Pergamon Museum, near a very strange sculpture. This is a marble statue of a girl dressed in a short tunic, pulled down from one shoulder. The girl's hair is tucked away in an adult way, she sits with her legs tucked up, looks down and absently picks through some pebbles. The most striking thing is that when you look at her from different sides, opposite feelings arise - tenderness, sadness, tenderness, hopelessness" ^{[3, p. 16]}. In the novel, Legkobytov himself talks about this important episode in his life, in the narrative there are additional details that are no longer related to the life of the prototype. The symbolism of the image of a girl playing with stones is also important for further narration and for revealing the image of the main character Uli, who will become Legkobytov's lover, as will be written below.

The novel also reflected such an episode of their life of Prishvin as imprisonment: "Through an apocalyptic fuse, Prishvin went to prison and almost went crazy, almost killed himself and, healed by nature and Efrosinia Pavlovna, soberly looked at things, being completely alone in this. The Russian intelligentsia was attracted to sectarians (there was fresh blood there) ..." ^{[4, p. 88]}. In the novel, the author somewhat thickens the situation, showing that the hero's life was in serious danger: "Legkobytov was captured among other employees of the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Volya Naroda, and it was decided to take all these people hostage to intimidate the intelligentsia and, if necessary, shoot them" ^{[3, p. 493]}.

Prishvin was a correspondent during the First World War: "And yet a soldier is one thing, a correspondent is another. <...> 1915-1916 – [Prishvin's] trip to the front as a war correspondent" ^{[4, p. 101]}. Interestingly, there are no dates in the novel, the entire chronology in the novel is built through the correlation of the events of the characters' lives with historical events, and the reader learns about Legkobytov's participation in military operations as a correspondent at the time of the narration about Ula: "At the end of spring, Ula came across an essay by Legkobytov in the "Field". The Shelomsky hunter, who became a war correspondent, as usual faithfully and tenaciously described what he saw in the winter August forests during the retreat of the Russian army..." ^{[3, p. 277]}.

But, of course, the main coincidence of the hero and the prototype is observed on a mental level, even if the reader did not know anything about the author's intention to bring out the heroes of his biographies as the heroes of the novel, he would still have a feeling of kinship between Legkobytov and the main singer of Russian nature. Pavel Matveyevich in the novel "The Mental Wolf" is depicted as a writer who constantly observes nature and depicts its beauty with pious reverence. Pavel Matveyevich tries to comprehend the essence of nature: "... he took off on a high slope, from where the whole surrounding land was visible up to the blue lake in the distance with the sails of fishermen and the domes of distant temples. There he sat down by a large forest stump, took a notebook from his belt and composed a novel about a provincial, seemingly timid, but very sharp-sighted tanned young man who accidentally gets from the wilderness to the cold capital" ^{[3, p. 52]}. Looking at the beautiful landscape, he was calm and focused, he was immersed in nature, feels it with his heart and draws creative inspiration from nature, treating it as something native.

We find the same thing in the biography of Prishvin. : "Prishvin is the prophet of ecological literature" ^[16]. Most of his work is represented by essays and diaries. In them, nature appears as a living being with emotions. For the hero, she is like a mother who deserves love and understanding. In Prishvin's view, it has a special charm and is full of bright colors – every flower and tree exudes the breath of life. The essence of Prishvin's work is perfectly described in the following fragment: "If nature could feel gratitude to a person for having penetrated into her secret life and glorified her beauty, then first of all this gratitude would fall to the share of the writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Prishvin" ^[5]. Thus, Varlamov in both cases depicted people whose creativity becomes an emotional bridge between man and nature, allowing the reader to learn more about the beauty of the surrounding world.

The prototype of Savely Kruda is Alexander Stepanovich Green. But Crood is rather a secondary person in the novel, he met Uli at a certain moment on the way, conquered her with hoaxes, entangled her with a dream, but after parting with him, nothing in her life changed, and even a stone that could symbolize the memory of the "prestidigitator" was stolen from her. Therefore, when using the biographical layer of the prototype of Krud, Varlamov rather dispenses with hints, there are fewer points of intersection between this hero and the prototype than in the previous case described by us. It can be assumed that Crood is more of a fictional character, perhaps a kind of collective image of the entire intelligentsia of that period, talented, passionate about hoaxes, but never found its place in a changed world. Nevertheless, it is possible to see the points of contact of some events in the life of Green and Crood.

First of all, this is a difficult childhood, early loss and general restlessness. Green's mother died early when he was 12 years old. The loss of his mother became a difficult ordeal for the hero: "... when my father closed the door, it was too late for me to comfort her <...> Green, who lost his mother in adolescence, always lacked feminine, maternal love and affection, and this death greatly influenced his character, the fact that he had been looking for this love all his life is undoubtedly" ^[1]. "My mother was ill, my father drank heavily and often, debts grew; all combined to create a difficult and ugly life. In a squalid environment, without any proper guidance, I grew up during my mother's lifetime; with her death it got even worse."^[1] The events of Krud's life practically echo this story, the only author's motivation for the hero's actions is given, which Varlamov did not allow himself in the biographical narrative. Here, for example, is the family story: "... from which his stepmother threw him out at the age of thirteen, and his father did not stand up for his son, but bought off with money. The two chervonets, which another could have had enough for six months of frugal life, the young Crood ate in Odessa restaurants for a month and since then he has been starving all his life, then he was chic, but he did not change his attitude to the laws of life" ^{[3, p. 416]}.

A detailed description in Green's biography of his "relationship" with the revolution: "Something similar – "crime and punishment" – fell to the lot of Green himself in his youth, only, recoiling from the ghost of the revolution, he went in a completely different direction. However, the topic of coming and going from the revolution became one of the most important, one might say generic, for Green. As a birth trauma" ^[1]. In the novel, it is replaced by a rather concise and, one might say, ironic enumeration: "After the family and the gymnasium, it was the turn of the army, prisons and other public institutions..." ^{[3, p. 416]}.

The psychological portrait of the hero and the prototype nevertheless coincides. In the novel, the author dwells on such a feature of Crood as misanthropy: "People, with rare exceptions, seemed to him stupid, greedy, self-satisfied creatures, but more than anything else in the world, he did not like their community <...> As much as Savely disliked the crowd, he also loved singles and looked for them everywhere" ^{[3, p. 416]}. Here, Green's words about himself, which Varlamov cited in the biography of the writer, are artistically played out: "In general, my peers didn't like me; I didn't have any friends. <...> I liked to play more alone, except for the game of money, which I always lost..." ^[1].

In our opinion, the love of the sea, ships and the desire to go south becomes important for creating and "guessing" the prototype: "After parting with the Hive, Savely moved to the port. He loved only sailing ships and those cities in whose harbors only sailboats are allowed to enter, but in the absence of such cities he went to an ordinary port, where boring gray ships stood under unloading or loading... <...> It was necessary to run not to the north, but to the south" ^{[3, pp. 421-427]}. In Green's biography, we read something close: "Green's path lay to the south, to Odessa, to the sea. He wanted to become a sailor. The sea seemed to him an alternative to Vyatka, a squalid provincial life, boredom, stagnation, his own worthlessness – the sea was an exit from "My life" into that world where all the sailors around him, and especially the sailors in their strange, exciting reflections of the unknown, clothes, were heroes, geniuses, people from the magical a circle of distant seas..." ^[1].

The image of the beloved is important for the contact of the image of Green and the image of Crood. Kruda – Alya: "Alya felt guilty and decided to arrange an escape for him. I drove a Turkish yacht with red sails to the shore..." ^{[3, p. 213]}. Green has Ekaterina: "Green has long loved the woman who, on a fateful November day in 1903, sent him on a mission contrary to his premonitions, and then unsuccessfully tried to get him out of prison, but instead she herself was exiled to Kholmogory. He loved Ekaterina Alexandrovna Bibergal, he pined for her when he was in prison, and the hero of the story cried about her..." ^[1].

"The man / the elder / the wanderer" – that's how Rasputin Grigory Efimovich was called in the novel. Another real historical character of A. Varlamov is Grigory Rasputin. In the "Mental Wolf" he is met by R.V., Vasily Khristoforovich Komissarov, Ulya and Vera Konstantinovna. In all episodes, he is mentioned without a name: he is simply called "the man", "the elder" or "he". The address "man" occurs 86 times, "elder" - 11 times, and "wanderer" - 25.

The first mention of the "man" in the novel is connected with Komisarov and the story of the appearance of Uli, whose child was predicted by the "man" to a childless family. Komissarov learns about the first attempt on Rasputin and reflects that he was not supposed to die from the knife of a crazy "woman", and then "appears" to the hero "where and when, at what hour" the tramp will die: "But why did such a bad, shameful death of the man's stomach happen? It would be fine if they were killed on a dark road in the dead of autumn or a cold winter night by dashing people, robbers, tati, on whom there is no cross..." ^{[3, p. 137]}. The futurological epiphany about the outcome of Rasputin's life is presented in the novel as a kind of "strange" feeling that overtook the hero. The sagacity of the "elder" himself is presented in the novel on the one hand as a kind of mystical ability, while all the attributes are respected: the vagueness, the understatement of prophecies about himself, about the fate of the royal family, about Russia. These "epiphanies of the future" can also be perceived in a mystical way, as an actual ability of the "elder" or an accidental premonition of the hero, or one can see in this the author's game with the temporal layers of the novel: the anticipation of the future by the hero is already a fait accompli for the author, but in need of some understanding with the help of artistic means that the novel has. This game is also evidenced by the appearance of another hero, Uncle Tom, who, in conversations with Komissarov, "blurts out" that he is a kind of messenger from the future.

Thus, in the novel "The Mental Wolf", within the framework of the artistic novel discourse, there is a rethinking of the material of biographies created by Varlamov earlier. The intertextual connections of biographies and the novel demonstrate Varlamov's author's attitude to recreate the reality that he could not depict within the framework of a documentary biographical narrative. Despite the coincidence of the factual material, Varlamov establishes a distance between the characters depicted in the novel and their prototypes, gives them new names, places them in slightly different event contexts. So, on the verge of fiction and historical, real subtext, the artistic world of the novel is created. Nevertheless, in our opinion, it is the biographical background that becomes an important element for understanding the genre polyphony of the novel. The biographism that Varlamov gives to the characters becomes the core on which fictional events are strung and within which fictional characters exist. At the same time, for example, the biography of the elder, whose prototype was Rasputin, is mythologized not so much by the standards of the depicted era, as by the laws of the modern author's idea of him ("When I began to study Rasputin, I realized that he could not be removed from Russian history, without him it is impossible to explain either the Silver Age or the revolution, neither the early Soviet era" ^[2]). Following the separate biographical data of the prototypes of the characters, Varlamov creates a different narrative in which biography is neither a framework component nor an autonomous genre, but is a kind of paradigm for the plot structure of the novel. And already in this paradigm, each of the characters is free to express their ideas, to argue about the present and future of Russia, to observe the era of historical social upheavals and wars.