The artistic reality of Salman Rudshi's novel "The Florentine Enchantress"

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

Anna Fedotova, who wrote good comments on Rudshi's novel "Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights", writes that "It is pointless to look for meanings in Rushdie's novel. It is better to surrender to the ocean of stories and let it carry you, caress, charm, awaken your imagination and feelings" ^[11]. On the one hand, this is correct, almost all Rushdie's novels contain so many different plans, independent storylines, inserts of various kinds that if you understand them, you will lose the feeling of the whole and the unity of experiences so necessary for a work of art, even if it belongs to the genre of "magical realism". On the other hand, the comprehension of a work is an organic aspect of its perception and experience, which was shown for the first time in "Poetics" by the great Aristotle ^[2]. Usually, the comprehension of a work (comments) after reading it is a retelling of its plot or striking themes with an interpretation of the content and form of this work. As for example, in the comment by Maya Stavinskaya.

"The locations of the novel are India and Italy, more precisely, the capital of the empire of the legendary Shah Akbar Fatehpur Sikri and Florence, then everywhere. Constantinople, which just at this time becomes Istanbul, Samarkand, where the heroine, the beautiful Princess Kara-Kez, comes from, the board of the Scottish brig and the ships of Amerigo Vespucci sailing to the shores of the New World. The characters are also in perfect order. Besides Akbar and Amerigo, Niccolo Machiavelli is also ‒ yes, the one who wrote the treatise “The Sovereign" and enriched world politics with the term Macchiavellianism. And how does it all coexist in one plane? Well, who else could have harnessed a bull and a trembling doe to the same cart, but this is Rushdie, the greatest of modern storytellers. That's why the story of the greatest beauty of all time, Kara-Kez, smart, independent and independent, who, in the company of her double maid and friend (and not only, uh, friend), will illuminate the entire inhabited universe with the radiance of divine charm, changing men and all the time unmistakably betting on the winner. But not out of treachery and greed, but in an effort to protect oneself and one's dignity, not to let the male world trample on oneself, and whoever condemns her is not me" ^[10].

Due to my profession (philosophy and humanities), I am not satisfied with ordinary reading, as a rule, I also try to understand a work of art in terms of how it is constructed, what the author wanted to say, whether it is possible to reconstruct what he did, whether his idea was successful, what his work was, etc., everything is in that the same reflective spirit. This case was no exception. In addition, I wanted to address another problem ‒ the integrity and organicity of the artistic reality of the "Florentine Enchantress". As Stavinskaya put it: "Well, who else would have harnessed a bull and a trembling doe to the same cart," and Aristotle in "Poetics" wrote directly about the integrity of a work of art:"... the parts of events must be connected in such a way that when rearranging or skipping some part, the whole changes and shakes. After all, what does not explain anything by its presence or absence does not constitute any part of the whole" ^{[2, p. 2078]}.

Now specifically regarding the "Florentine Enchantress". Some readers note in their comments that they failed to combine the various plans and compositional constructions of the novel into a whole. For example, a reader with the nickname varvarr writes: "An incredibly blurred plot, a message I did not understand, a host of names, Eastern and European, a bunch of nicknames and their translations... Probably, I was not ready for a trembling doe and a horse in the same team called "magical realism"... the "Rebel" Rushdie, in my opinion, went too far and did it in the opportunistic interests...".

Or another with the nickname iri-sa: "Everything is so far-fetched, fabulous and absolutely uninteresting! Magic tricks, drugs, a fictional wife, suddenly, out of nowhere, heirs appear, about whom no one ever knew anything... Although... The confirmation of the relatives, however, received these fictions. So much has been woven into a single oriental tangle here, but I can't find the words to tell you. Fiction on fiction. I didn't like either the book or the genre to which it belongs."^[12] This novel has been discussed abroad for a long time: the complexity of its understanding is noted, as well as the connection of the unconnected. I will give an example of the statements of two authors. "As always," writes Magdalena Ball, "Rushdie manages to go beyond the here and now into a world full of synthesis: smells, sights, sensations, longing, hunger, fear, color, place and emotions mix until it becomes too much for the reader to perceive...In many ways, The Enchantress of Florence is a story about history: a meta‒prose that examines and crosses the line between fiction and reality. It may seem like a fairy tale, but psychologically, fiction is behind most of our reality...However, putting aside the fictional imperative, there has clearly been a lot of research done for this story. Besides Akbar the Great, this novel has a real long list of famous people, from Lorenzo de' Medici, Machiavelli, Savonarola, Botticelli, Andrea Doria and even Elizabeth I...Apart from the density of the characters and the multitude of secondary storylines and stories, the language of the book also threatens to overwhelm her. Part of it is Rushdie's natural style to have breathtakingly rich sentences, but in this novel he goes further than before. At times, the “Enchantress of Florence” buckles under the weight of her verbosity: As such, it is a pleasant but confusing novel that takes a complex and fascinating historical plot and turns it into something completely modern. Leaving the flaws aside, few people have such literary prowess as Rushdie. As he says himself: "A silver-plated tongue gives enough charm" ^[13].

"My essay," read Andriescu Garcia, "is aimed at analyzing the dialectical relationship between historical reality and fiction in Salman Rushdie's novel The Enchantress of Florence. I will point out a complex and playful story in which the author interweaves elements of history and literature, a playful story that goes beyond the canonical framework of postmodernism, where the novel was constantly placed by the critical establishment, and goes back to the origins, to the anthropological function of the game as an integral human activity, which was once defined by Johan Huizinga in the book “Homo Ludens: A study of the game element in culture.”.. Rushdie manages to break down the barriers between reality and fiction and, using universal textual mechanisms, mix history and reality in such a way that they merge. Consequently, he composes a play within the framework of fiction, which is as strong as reality itself, and assumes the fact that the representation has a greater ontological sequence than the body or event itself represented. We exist as long as people write and talk about us, and nothing in the order of reality can be as strong as the reality of language" ^[14].

If someone thinks that we are talking only about Rushdie and this novel, then they are mistaken. Many readers had a similar reaction, for example, to the novel "My Children" by our famous young writer Guzel Yakhina. Here's just one review.

Galina Yuzefovich. "The phantasmagoric reality inside the novel turns out to be a metaphor, but a metaphor without a key, referring to nothing and hanging in the air… <..Having repeatedly become entangled in magical subtexts, and after getting out of them, swimming across the river of adjectives and adverbs, overcoming the sea of poetic images, lovingly written out details and other verbal beauties, the reader finds himself facing a disappointing conclusion: at the level of the idea “My children” are again reduced to the banal “in any circumstances, a person has a chance to live his own life with all her sorrows, joys, gains and losses.”. Only if last time, in order to illustrate this simple thesis, Yakhina made do with a stingy and understandable Siberian village, then this time for some reason she needed to build a whole big-budget fantasy world vaguely similar to the world of the German Volga region of the 1920s. In principle, it is not punishable, of course, but we understood it well from the first time" ^[9].

In the article "The Artistic Reality of Guzel Yakhina's novel "My Children", I show that a new way of constructing a work of art and artistic reality is currently conquering the stage ^[4]. The artist (writer, painter, composer) does not so much recreate the events of the world opposing him (he may enter it himself, but precisely as an alienated one), as he creates on the basis of these events a world expressing his own personality and consciousness (let's call this approach and genre "private realism"). As a result, the logic that organizes these events is more subordinated to his personality and consciousness, more precisely, it is a hybrid logic, since it is necessary to satisfy the peculiarities of the events of the opposing world. So, Rushdie, even at a superficial glance, acts within the framework of this new tradition (in this case, it is better to attribute his work not to magical realism, but to private), and I wanted to use the example of the "Florentine Enchantress" to better understand the hybrid logic of his work.

Something about the author of the "Florentine Enchantress"

Rushdie, as you know, is a man of two civilizations and cultures ‒ the West and the East, which, by the way, was reflected in his novel. He studied history when he studied at King's College, Cambridge University, which again affected the creation of the "Florentine Enchantress". We must agree that, when talking about the Mughal dynasty, the life and capital of Padishah Akbar, the events of Italy at that time, or, for example, the vicissitudes of Niccolo Machiavelli's personality, Rushdie strictly adheres to real history as described by historians, whose works, like a scientist, he refers to at the end of the book ^{[5, pp. 375-380]}. However, it is unusual: a novel with elements of fiction and even mysticism and at the same time with references to scientific research.

Rudshi began his career as a young media specialist: an artist in the theater, a journalist, a copywriter in advertising agencies, "where he came up with the "irresistibubble" for the Aero chocolate bar and Naughty but Nice cream cakes, wrote the slogan "That'll do nicely" for American Express, in collaboration with musician Ronnie Bond Rushdie wrote the lyrics for an advertisement for the now defunct Burnley Building Society, which was recorded at Good Earth Studios in London (The song was called “Better Dreams” and was sung By George Chandler)" ^[6]. Having become a writer, Rushdie did not forget the skills he acquired in organizing public communications, almost all of his works are focused on entertaining the public. In the "Florentine Enchantress" this task is solved in two ways. On the one hand, the events are organized according to the logic of a detective: one of the main characters, the rootless Niccolo Vespucci, declares himself the uncle of the great Akbar and the reader tries to understand how this is possible almost to the end of the novel, and only at the end this intrigue is resolved, although it is being prepared gradually. On the other hand, the novel is full of Mont Blanc of interesting information, situations, vicissitudes, both real (historical) and fictional of two kinds ‒ fantastic, fabulous and quite realistically possible. New and interesting information, as well as experiences of extraordinary events, are pouring down on the reader, he almost does not have time to digest and comprehend all this.

It is not so easy to understand Rudsha's attitude to history and modernity. It is not religious, he is skeptical of faith, and religious fundamentalism is simply considered a social evil. In an interview, Rudshi said: "Instead of one iron curtain, many communities have emerged, ready to kill and die for their limited ideas about the structure of the world" ^[7]. "The idea of sacredness is one of the most conservative ideas in any culture, because it seeks to turn all other ideas — doubts, progress, change ‒ into crimes... The fundamentalist believes that we do not believe in anything. That he has absolute values, and we are mired in sybaritism and compromise. To prove him wrong, we must agree on common values: kissing in public, bacon sandwiches, modern fashion, literature, generosity, water, equal distribution of resources, freedom of thought, love. This is our weapon. We will win not by war, but by living without fear for our values."^[8]

However, you can always ask the question, and what are the values of Rudsha based on, on which whales or turtles are they worth? I personally have not found the answer to this existential question. It seems that Rushdie interprets the story in the spirit of modernity, since in Rudshi's novels the characters often think either modernly or on the basis of unclear logic, but not medieval. It seems to me that Rudshi understands modernity as social chaos and senselessness ‒ wars, suspicions, resentments, intrigues, conflicts, suffering and other actions and processes that are unconditioned and incomprehensible. So in the "Florentine Enchantress" it is hardly possible to understand the conditionality of what is happening. More precisely, the specific reasons are indicated: these are love, sex, thirst for adventure, desire for power, vanity, fear, curiosity, and so on, however, in general, there is a picture of the elements and fate, incomprehensible, invincible, attracting no one knows where. Roughly what it looks like on the surface of social life at the moment.

Reconstruction of the scheme of construction of artistic reality

Let's go from the author. Creating the novel "The Florentine Enchantress", Rushdie solved several problems. Firstly, he revived the history of the Middle Ages, inhabiting it with his heroes and their deeds. The fact is that for an ordinary person (not a scientist), the past history is both incomprehensible and dead. Of course, reading and studying history, a person understands what historians tell, but, as a rule, this knowledge is formal. I suppose that Rushdie also felt this formalism as a student, and when he began to write his works, he decided to overcome it. How? Namely, as an artist, having re-created history through the actions of people he understands, turning them into heroes of the work and at the same time participants in history. Why did he take modern people as heroes? In my opinion, because I believed, in fact, people of the past in their actions, behavior and psyche differ little from modern ones. By the way, this belief is shared by many venerable modern scientists.

Secondly, Rushdie created an artistic narrative that would engage the audience, forcing the reader to experience, enjoy, and live the events of the work. To do this, he built the "Florentine Enchantress", on the one hand, as a detective, on the other ‒ populated it with events that were attractive and interesting, as well as informative (knowledge of the history of the Middle Ages).

Thirdly, in "The Florentine Enchantress", as well as in his other works, Rushdie directly, but more often covertly (indirectly) shares his ideas about life and people, realizes, psychologists would say, his desires and values. The attractiveness of the events in the work is ensured, among other things, by the modernity of the author's events. Here, for example, the characters discuss the problems of power, feminist plots, psychological (the relationship between Me and Us, the problem of artistic perception of the invisible, reflection on their actions). In general, the events should have inclined the reader to reflect on modern life, for example, social chaos and meaninglessness. The connection between history and modernity is noted by many commentators of the "Florentine Enchantress".

Solving the artistic task itself, Rushdie creates characters who live in two different realities ‒ historical and modern. The characters of his novel are two-faced: on the one hand, they honestly reproduce the deeds and speeches of historical characters (Rushdie took these speeches and deeds from historical books), but on the other hand they speak and experience like modern people. Here are three examples. In one, Padishah Akbar, irritated by the mustache and behavior of the defeated ruler of the city, cuts off his head, which, of course, is just a historical fact, but immediately he begins to reflect and experience in the spirit characteristic of a modern personality. "The puppy, the arrogant one, imagines that he is smarter than everyone else," Akbar thought with irritation... and with the exclamation "Allahu Akbar", which could mean "Allah is great" or "Akbar the Almighty", cut off the pathetic pimple of his arrogant, uncooperative and instantly became absolutely worthless head.

After the murder of the prince, as always in such cases, Akbar was visited by a familiar demon of loneliness…One of the main contradictions of his nature was that, being not only a philosophizing and crying murderer, but also an egocentric, accustomed to servility and flattery, nevertheless longed for a completely different world, one where he could meet an equal, a kindred soul, a brother in mind, a man with whom it was possible to share thoughts, share knowledge, experiencing and giving the joy of communication; he dreamed of such a world structure in which it would be possible to prevail over the enemy not through bloody massacre, but in a more pleasant way, although requiring the exertion of all mental forces ‒ that is, during a dispute" ^{[5, pp. 47-48]}.

It is very doubtful that Akbar, who considered himself, if not a god in heaven, then a god for his subjects, could have such humane thoughts. The medieval emperor and king could not think like that in principle. What a "brother in mind", God directed the mind, from him the mind of the padishah or the king, but not ordinary people. For example, Ivan the Terrible, in his Letters to Kurbsky and others, traces his ancestry "from Augustus Caesar and his brother Prus to Rurik and the Kievan princes." The divine origin of the Russian tsars, according to Ivan the Terrible, justifies "the unlimited prerogatives of the royal power: the tsar should not be bound by anyone or anything in his actions; he is not responsible for his actions before his subjects, but only before God, therefore he is above the law, and even if he acts wrongfully ‒ this is only a sin, not a crime" ^{[3, p. 44]}. Akbar comes to similar conclusions, despite all his humanism.

"He did not want to be considered a deity, and at the same time sincerely believed in his right to absolute power. But then it turned out that the strange thought that visited him about the benefits of insubordination was simply blasphemous. His power over the lives of others is based on the right of the strongest. Whose power is right ‒ and it is this principle that should be fundamental for any realistic-minded sovereign, all other arguments, including on the topic of virtue, are nothing more than a convenient cover" ^{[5, pp. 328-329]}

The second example. Machiavelli brings back to life a captive, a very beautiful girl who was hypnotized and turned into a kind of message "The Palace of Memories" (she remembered nothing except the text that had to be transmitted, including Machiavelli). Removing hypnosis, Machiavelli hoped that the girl would be able to love him, but the result was unexpected and terrible ‒ remembering her life, the girl threw herself out of the window and died. The story with the girl was clearly invented by Rushdie, but it could well have taken place in the Middle Ages, but Machiavelli's experiences (or the comments of the author from whom this text was made is unclear) after her death are very modern and completely uncharacteristic for those times.

"You can somehow exist while your brain is asleep, until you realize what life has done to you. But when the ability to think comes back to you, it doesn't cost anything to go crazy. Awakened memory can cause you irreparable harm. The memory of many humiliations, violence committed on your body, the memory of a great many men who possessed you is no longer a palace (the "palace of memories" was the name of the technique described by Cicero for memorizing a large amount of information. ‒ V.R.), it's just a brothel of memories. And in addition, the ruthlessly sober realization that all the people you love are dead and there is nowhere to wait for salvation.…Then you, like everyone else, should die. You have to run, run fast, so as not to have time to feel anything, and overcome the glass obstacle between the two worlds as if the glass had become air, and the air was glass, and while you were flying, it showered you with fragments. It's good to fall. How good it is to fall out of life" ^{[5, p. 208]}.

The third example. We are talking about content inspired by numerous visual reflections of modern literature and television (images go out into the world or the viewer goes into the screen, into the reality of the image). In this case, the image of the amazingly beautiful princess Kara-Kez ("Black‒Eyed") from the Mogul family, created by the brilliant artist Deshwant, comes to life and communicates with people, and the artist, on the contrary, goes into the world of his painting (by the way, one of the first such reflections is Gogol's "Portrait", where the image of the pawnbroker comes to life, recalculates gold coins, which are then picked up by the hero when he wakes up).

"Deshwant immediately set to work, and soon he had a whole series of magnificent drawings…As Deshwant created new paintings representing Kara-Kez in the prime of beauty and youth, it became increasingly clear that his brush had downright magical power. The images were so full of life that Birbal (the Grand Vizier and close friend of Emperor Akbar, a wise and witty man. ‒ V.R.), when he saw them for the first time, prophetically said: "I'm afraid for Deshwant. He is so fascinated by this long-dead woman that it will be difficult for him to break away from her and return to the present ... despite the vigilant observation, the artist managed to disappear without a trace... The mystery, as expected, was solved by Birbal. Eight days after Deshwant's disappearance, this most astute of Akbar's courtiers, hoping to find the key to the artist's disappearance, drew attention to a certain oddity that had remained unnoticed until now. It seemed that in the lower left corner the drawing slightly went beyond the format chosen by the artist and was continued under a wide ornamental frame. The painting was returned to the studio, and Akbar himself, as well as Birbal and Abu-Fizl, followed there. Under the guidance of both Persian masters, the frame was carefully separated from the sheet and when the hidden piece of painting appeared to the eyes of those present, there was a universal exclamation of amazement: there, hunched like a small turtle, with a roll of drawings clutched to his chest, stood Dashvant - the great painter... Dashvant, who escaped to the world where the princess lived hidden from everyone" ^{[5, pp.132,138, 140-141]}.

The next question is how Rushdie connects, unites into the unity of the novel narrative (narrative of the work) the history and vicissitudes of the characters (historical events with the actions of fictional characters, both historical and non-historical). The first technique is the identification of historical subjects with non-historical ones. For example, Akbar is a historical subject and a fictional subject, reasoning like a modern man and dealing with the impostor Niccola Vespucci. Ago Vespucci and Niccolo Machiavelli's real friend and the one who passionately fell in love with the beautiful Cara-Kez with a Mirror (her maid looked exactly like her mistress) and went with them to the New World, becoming the husband of both. Kara is a descendant, Rushdie claims, of the Mughals (the sister of Babur, the founder of the empire) and a princess who, after many troubles in Italy, found herself under the protection of Antonino Argaglia, and then left for America with a Mirror. Jodha and Akbar's ideal lover, created by his imagination, and his third real wife, Miriam uz Zamani, the daughter of the Amberian rajah of the Kachhwah family.

Miriam uz Zamani. She was also mentioned

under several other names,

including Jodha Bai.

Interestingly, such an identification does not concern historical events in any way, since either events that do not affect history or subjects whose existence cannot be proved are selected. For example, as in the case of Kara-kez or Jodhi. Professor Irfan Habib, former chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research, says: "There was no historical character named Jodha Bai." It is true that Akbar married the eldest daughter of the ruler of Amber, Raja Bharmal, but her name is not mentioned anywhere."^[1]. And yet questions arise, for example, Ago Vespucci, who left Florence for the sake of the Caracades and went to America, is formally very similar to Mary go Vespucci, who discovered the New World with Columbus (however, it is known that Amerigo returned to his homeland and died there, unlike Ago who died in America).

The second technique is the necessary connection of plot lines. So the line of kinship of the Great Moguls passes into the line of events in Florence and then the life of Cara-Kez with the Mirror and the Death of Vespucci in America. The line of adventures and vicissitudes of the life of Niccolo Vespucci, the son of the daughter of the Mirror and Ago, connects with a certain part of Akbar's life and reign. Not everything about Rushdie fits together in terms of time, but, on the one hand, magic comes to the rescue, and on the other, the time gap can be used usefully, for example. to introduce new events (so Akbar does not believe Niccolo and sends him away from himself).

"The man in front of us," says Gulbadan begum, Akbar's aunt, ‒is thirty, well, thirty‒one - no more. It follows from this that if the princess has reached Italy, as this man tells us, and if, according to his assurances, he is her own son, then she should give birth to him at about sixty‒two to sixty-four years old. Well, if such a miracle really took place, then he really is Your Majesty's uncle, the son of your grandfather's sister and has every right to be called a prince. But they don't give birth at sixty-two, so this version doesn't work. <…>

"Firstly," said Hamida Banu, Akbar's mother, "the disappeared princess, as you know, was a sorceress and knew the secret of eternal youth, so it is quite possible that she managed to preserve her youth, beauty and even give birth in her seventies…

‒ Suppose, ‒ Gulbadan supported, ‒ this man is not lying and the said princess and her soldier really got to Italy many years ago. Then it is possible that the mother of the man standing in front of us was not the royal lover of this Argali…

‒And her daughter," the emperor finished for her <…>

‒My mother, Cara-Kez,‒ Niccolo Vespucci said, ‒is your grandfather's sister. She was a sorceress, she could stop time.

"It's not true," Akbar said decisively, "she didn't know how to do that" ^{[5, pp. 125-127, 363]}

The third technique is widely used by Rushdie, not only to connect different lines and realities, but also for his other two purposes (entertaining readers and expressing his own thoughts) ‒ it's magic and fantasy. However, it is worth noting that, as a rule, the relevant events are not taken from the ceiling by Rushdie or invented independently, they already exist in culture. Consider two examples: the image of Jodhi, which Akbar recreated with his imagination and revived, but only for himself, and the pacification of a rabid elephant, which was supposed to trample Niccolo.

There is nothing unusual in creating an ideal lover in his imagination, but Akbar not only creates Jodha, but also communicates with her, talks to her and even loves her like an ordinary woman, and this despite the fact that he looks like a rational person in the novel (remember what he says to Nicolo: "It's not true, Kara-Kez she couldn't stop time!). In psychiatry, communicating with one's projection and image, perceiving them as a living person, would qualify as schizophrenia. Akbar is a schizophrenic and at the same time a wise ruler and husband, "cool," our children would say.

"From one of the wives, the imaginary and most beloved spouse took beauty, from another ‒ faith, from the third ‒ untold riches. However, the emperor's character was invented by himself. In unselfishness, in attention to the slightest desire of the master, in readiness to put herself at his disposal at any time of the day or night, she had no equal among the living. She was unreal and perfect ‒ what a dream can be <…>

She was almost certain that once she stepped outside the palace walls, the spell would lose its power and she would cease to live. <...> Jodha knew that her illustrious husband had inherited the gift of witchcraft from his ancestors <...> She's a witch too. She conjured herself up. She only needs to bewitch one person, and he is already here, next to her. He didn't go to the other wives. He came for pleasure. <...> She waited ... but the subtleties of the love act lost all attraction for him, he sought to quickly master her and put an end to it" ^{[5, c. 57, 58, 60, 62, 65]}.

The episode with the rabid elephant was preceded by two others: in the first, Niccolo Vespucci passes into the emperor's palace, calmly overcoming numerous guards (his mistress Mohini-Skeletina had the gift of giving her clients such smells that opened all the doors), in the second, Niccolo was accused of lying, of appropriating someone else's sacred name and sentenced to execution by trampling a rabid elephant. But thanks to the smell, he was unharmed.

"Before you are allowed to see the emperor, you will have to appease many people," Mohini warned. ‒ Therefore, the fragrance is for His Majesty I'll hide it deeper, under the scents that you'll have to use to fool the guards and others. In the presence of the emperor, all of them will disappear, only the most important one will remain. <…>

The prisoner's hands were untied ‒ with their help he could not save himself in any way, but would only accept death with great dignity. The condemned man stretched his hands up to the elephant, and in front of all those gathered, the elephant suddenly calmed down, allowed himself to be stroked, and then the nobility, and the commoners simultaneously gasped in amazement: the elephant carefully wrapped his trunk around the body of the prisoner, lifted him ‒ and now the yellow-haired stranger is sitting on the elephant's back, like some prince" ^{[5, pp. 75, 109]}.

Does Mohini's ability to compose scents that control human behavior resemble the abilities of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, the hero of the novel "The Perfumer" by Patrick Suskind ‒ one to one? Suskind's novel was published in 1985, and Rudshi's for the first time in 2008. Why doesn't Rushdie include Suskind's novel in his list of literature, but it's not there. In this case, I am still interested not in this circumstance, but in the fact that Rudshi relies on a narrative that already exists in culture. And most of his borrowings are exactly like that, which is not bad, rather good, it's another matter how to submit such things publicly.

The story with the smells is of course fantastic, partly fabulous, since the hero, to the reader's delight, remains unharmed in a completely hopeless situation. And there are many similar fantastic episodes in Rushdie's book, including the first appearance in the Kara-Kez palace and the most recent, where the long-dead Kara-Kez returns to the emperor.

(The first phenomenon of Kara-Kez). "It was getting dark. The servants brought candles, and there was a smell of camphor in the air. Lamps with cotton oil-soaked wicks were lit on the solid back wall, and in their light the shadows of two women danced on the carved lattices-djali. At that moment, on the other half of the palace, the emperor's fantasy, his khayal, acquired a completely and irrevocably new look... not two, but three shadows danced on the latticed jalis, and they (Akbar's mother and wife. ‒ V.R.) began to appear clearer and clearer right out of the air in the swirling twilight the figure of a woman. Her lips were smiling slightly

‒ You are not Jodha! ‒ the queen mother stammered.

‒ That's right," the vision said, and her black eyes twinkled mockingly. Jodha-bai is gone. The Emperor doesn't need her anymore. From now on, I will always be by his side. <…>

(Return) "At night, the hidden princess Kara-Kez appeared in his tent in all the splendor of her beauty... sat at his feet and gently touched his hand. The night was ending. The past had lost all meaning for him. Only the present remains‒ her eyes. In their mesmerizing light, all generations shifted, shifted and merged together…

‒ You see," she said, ‒I'm here. You let me come back. Now, O guardian of the universe, I belong to you alone.

Oh yes, my love, Akbar thought. ‒ Oh, yes, until you decide otherwise" ^{[5, pp. 344-345, 373-374]}.

Let's ask ourselves why many readers do not understand the "Florentine Enchantress" well. In my opinion, there are two reasons for this. One is related to the very attitude of understanding: readers start reading Rushdie's works, believing that they are looking at an ordinary novel, well, in the genre of historical literature with elements of fiction and fairy tales, or, at least, in the genre of postmodern literature. But still, they believe, Rushdie describes a certain existing or fictional world, a world opposed to the author. But Rushdie, as I noted, writes a work in the genre of private realism, creates an artistic reality that largely expresses the contents and features of his consciousness. In order to understand Rushdie (or, say, Umberto Eco, Guzel Yahina), it is necessary, firstly, to change the attitude to understanding, and secondly, to have a certain interest in the problems and discourses of such masters.

The second reason is the unpreparedness of readers to work with such complex material, which involves recreating a complete work and reality based on the images, storylines, themes and other expressive means offered by the author. Here, of course, the author's help is needed and, in my opinion, Rushdie does not understand this enough. As I show, many of his characters are contradictory, their twists and turns distort historical events, it is difficult to understand how individual storylines are connected.

There is another circumstance: Rushdie paints a world of social chaos, struggle, intrigue, injustice, suffering. People are ruled by the desire for power, enrichment, pleasure, and sex. In such a world, a person focused on goodness, peace and justice hardly wants to live, which is why, I think, "The Florentine Enchantress" is alien to many readers. The famous Israeli writer Meir Shalev also recreates a social world going nowhere. Nevertheless, this is not a world of chaos, and you sympathize with its heroes, because they are similar to us not only in terms of human weaknesses, but also positive aspirations.