ru_translate | "Университет" Валерия Брюсова

avva предлагает начать обсуждение Торы. Я вспомнил рассказ, который перевел в 1996 году:

Valery Briusov

The University

In a large city on a prominent street stood the university building. The building was old, built in the early XIX century, in the beautiful style of Alexander I, with pillars. On the second floor there were vast halls and auditoriums, with tall and wide windows. Below were the basements, and their windows, barely above the ground, were small and dark; they were protected with iron grates.
The day I am describing was a Sunday. There were no lectures at the university, and most auditoriums were locked. Only one was open, the biggest one, because in it a doctoral dissertation was being defended. The auditorium was overcrowded because the future doctor was a favorite of the students and of many city youths. In the hall, the listeners had been coming since early morning, took all the chairs, stood in the aisles, were very thirsty, but did not wish to leave, determined to enjoy the triumph of their favorite professor.
The scholar defending the dissertation was applying for the degree of a doctor of world history. His dissertation dealt with the dependence of the Biblical tales on the Babylonian ones. Although the question was not new, the author of the dissertation, who had personally studied cuneiform tablets and had worked much in the new Museum of the Near East in Berlin, managed to find a mass of evidence in favor of the thesis that the Hebrews were merely pale copyists of their eastern neighbors. If you believed the dissertation, it turned out that not only such generic tales as the Fall from the Garden of Eden, Cain’s murder of Abel, the Flood, son Ham’s lack of respect for his father, are shards from the legends of Babylon, but even all the details of the Biblical narratives, for example the names of the valleys, the words put into the patriarchs’ mouths, even all the turns of speech – all were mere repetitions of the others’ lore. It seemed as if the Hebrews were a people utterly lacking imagination, and incapable of the most modest creativity, that even in order to say “And Jacob lifted up his eyes, and looked, and, behold, Esau came,” they had to look up some brick from the library of Ashurbanipal.

Whether this was true or not, the faculty recognized the dissertation as “a valuable contribution to science”. And how could they not recognize it as such, as it was the first one to include the texts chiseled out on bricks that lay buried for millennia in the sands of the Syrian deserts, and for decades had been challenging the patience and sharp wittedness of European scholars. How could they not recognize the aspirant worthy of the scholarly decree, as it was revealed that he knew the life, the customs, the laws, and the religion of ancient Babylonians better than we know the customs and the beliefs of the peoples inhabiting Russia, that he could express himself in cuneiform as easily as poor schoolboys in Latin, the language they had been studying in gymnasiums for years and years. How could they not, after all, find the professor a doctor of world history, as everyone knew that he had studied for forty years continuously, read through several libraries, wrote almost a whole library all by himself, and would study even more, and read through more libraries, and would write another whole library.

The decision of the faculty was followed by long rounds of applause. The students held the dear professor in their arms, and swung him in frenzy. During this minute every student was thinking that some day he too, having read through libraries, would write another such learned book, would also be recognized as a doctor of some science or another, and would also achieve such honor: to swing and leap up and down in the hands of the admiring students, hitting the floor with his legs.

From the university, the new doctor was going to a first class restaurant, where his admirers ordered a dinner in honor of the successful defense of his dissertation. He knew that the dinner would include speeches exalting his scholarship, and he would reply with more speeches, in which he would show even more of the various kinds of learning that he had mastered.

While all this was happening on the second floor of the university, which had large halls, vast auditoriums and tall windows – in the lower semi basement floor, in the apartment of one of the night guards, where the windows were cramping narrow, behind an iron grate, in the corner under the icons sat Mashka and Mishka. Mashka and Mishka were the night guard’s children, the former ten years old, and the latter eight, and they were alone in the apartment (if only you could call two cramped half dark rooms an apartment) because their father was free this Sunday, and went to their godmother for the whole day, and their mother died two years before. Leaving, the father locked the door, and told Mashka sternly to look after Mishka, and after trying everything and eating the piece of bread their father left them for a dinner, the nanny yanked her brother’s curls a couple of times, called him a bad word as many times, and by now had made peace with him, and for the umpteenth time started gaping at the woodprints hanging below the icons.
Here was, first of all, the Russo Turkish war, with General Skobelev twice the height of the poor Turks that were blown in two by grenades, then there was a picture of the crowning of His Imperial Majesty, and finally there was the woodprint that intrigued the children the most, depicting the Temptation of Adam and Eve. Eve, all tangled in hair so she looked more like a marmoset than our foremother, was stepping from behind a tree, and giving Adam, who was sitting behind the bush at the left, an apple; from the branch, a serpent with a human face hung, sticking out its forked tongue, a sign of perfidy.

This picture, painted with purple, orange and green paints, with the sky the color of a moldy orange, was bothering the children for too long. They asked their father, Aunt Ofrosinia, and even Sergeant Spiridon, who occasionally came in for a shot of vodka, about it, but no one could give them a satisfactory answer. The father would just yell, “none of your affair, you snotnose rascal,” Aunt Ofrosinia explained that this was holy martyr Antonia, who was hiding in the woods and grew hairy all over, and only Sergeant Spiridon told them carefully that these are our holy forefather and foremother, who lived with all the beasts, clean and unclean, after the Flood, like we now live with cows, chickens and geese. The children could not get anyone else to tell them more.

And now, standing under the icons and staring at the mysterious woodprint again, both of them, the ten year old nanny and her eight year old brother, were trying to comprehend the meaning of the painted figures. The aunt’s and the uncle’s explanations mixed up in their memory, so they could not quite understand which one was Saint Antonia, and where the unclean beasts were, and what is a flood, and how it was depicted on the woodprint. Mashka was explaining this all to Mishka authoritatively, but he saw that the nanny herself hardly understood what she was saying, and corrected her without embarrassment. In the meantime, the basement was becoming darker and darker, and it was becoming harder to tell red cheeky Eve’s face from the equally red apple she was offering to blush Adam….

The new doctor was descending the stairs, surrounded by the jubilant admirers. He was going to the dinner organized to honor his intelligence and erudition. The children in the basement were trying to comprehend the strange explication of Aunt Ofrosinia and Sergeant Spiridon. They could not understand why the unclean serpent had a dark human face.

1910