KUPRIN WITNESS TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE HORROR OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ANTONIO PARRA

When he lived in an inhospitable attic in Pigalle, he went to the station of Austerlitz at the time when the Trans-Siberian train was leaving for Moscow, to see who was going to the coveted distant homeland, got into one of the carriages and sat there for a while before the column touches. I felt like I was stepping on a piece of Russian land. The son of a baron or small landlord, born in 1870, he was a supporter of the democratic Mensheviks and later of General Wrangel’s forces against Lenin. He had to flee, but from the horrors of that revolution, from that longing for the departed, from that typically Russian longing (taská) pulsating in all his books and indomitable, especially in the short stories and narratives of the Impressionists.

 His famous story "Derebiu" ("The Village") is one of the masterpieces of world literature. In 1918, he fled to Berlin. Then he found himself in Paris, divorced from his wife, starving and the struggle to survive led him to complain in a letter to his friend Turgenev that his existence had turned into constant movements in search of cheaper housing. Until he can't stand it anymore and asks for a visa at the Soviet embassy. Contrary to the assumptions associated with his biography, he was not only granted a security certificate, but also met with all honors in the hotel "Metropolis" in Moscow.

 The government registers him in the Consortium of Writers and even allocates him a cottage outside the family. Stalin was then a “little father” as the Trial of the Doctors had not yet begun. Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin returned from exile old and sick. When he came to inhale the fumes of the steam locomotives bound for Siberia, he knew that that place in the compartment which he caressed as part of the national soil was the soil awaiting his death. Twenty-five years have passed since I heard the singing of Moscow nightingales. “The flowers of this country,” he wrote in his field notebook, “smell different from those of other places.”

The Soviet government not only placed him in a small country house on the outskirts, but also allocated him a doctor and a nurse with whom he fell in love. Her name was Elizabeth, and he married her shortly before his death on August 25, 1938. Esophageal cancer and Alzheimer’s disease meant he wrote virtually nothing upon his return from exile, but he was well treated in the USSR, contrary to his boasts. and was arranged a state funeral. His beautiful wife Elizabeth, who was thirty years his junior, was not so lucky. He committed suicide in early 1943, during the siege of Leningrad.

 “The Village,” a book I read as a teenager, was one of the texts that made the biggest impression on me. I still remember the small eight format in yellow binding from the Universal Collection. His motto in the mug was mood, and those Russian authors I started reading in cheap editions or whose pages I picked up in the Cuatro Caminos library and enchanted myself while disconnecting from the world on the Gran Via Estrecho route were true Prometheans.

My encounter with Russian literature was an insight, it outlined directions. And this Atlanta from the Universal Collection is the true destiny of this huge country: to be the Christmas carrying the weight of this planet. In this sense, Russian poets, heirs of classical Greece through the lens of the Christian tradition, feel themselves part of a messianic mission.

Kuprin (which is why I praise him so much) was my combat baptism. Gogol continued with his grotesque and functional sense of humor, calling some miscreants Gosydars (His Excellency), but with fine criticism describing the customs of Jews, anti-Semites, and very Catholic Poles.

 With Gogol in Taras Bulba, with whom I spent a wonderful Christmas, I wanted to be a hetman and fly to the Caucasus to protect the tsar enlisted in the sentu (squadron). The Cossack presented to them is so amusing that he admits to preferring hookah to his wife.

Because without it you can do, and for a Cossack to quit smoking is impossible. And this is not a story about a good tube.

Chekhov made me fall desperately in love with the unattainable Dulcine. Olga personifies chemically pure platonism, which is the wrong way to love,