This book is intended to introduce the writer’s philosophical, moral, religious views, his thoughts about the value of human life, understanding the essence of Christianity and human paths to spirituality.
The book is intended for everyone interested in the philosophical problems of man, the history of culture and religion.
Return of Don Quixote
An amazing book, which critics called either “Chesterton’s brilliant joke”, or “one of the most significant satirical novels of the 20th century,” or “a masterpiece of surreal prose.”
The mischievous story of the comic-heroic adventures of Sir Douglas Murrell, "the last of the knights errant", and his faithful squire, who calls himself "Sancho Panza", continues to delight and captivate the reader - and immerse him in a world of inimitable, truly British humor.
Alive man
The novel “Man Alive” (1913) is an exemplary parable, defending one after another the simple values of simple human life and this life itself, and this world. If the word “optimism” is applied to Chesterton, this is the focus of his optimism. Neither earlier, nor even later, did he write so unconditionally and directly.
Napoleon of Nottinghill
The eccentric official Oberon Quinn unexpectedly becomes the new king of Great Britain. In his post, he continues to have fun, putting forward unexpected ideas. One of the king's jokes was the creation of a "Charter of the Suburbs", glorifying the glory and former liberties of the districts of London. But there was one person who took the Charter seriously.
Orthodoxy
"To show that a faith or philosophy is correct from any point of view is too difficult even for a book much larger than this. One path of reasoning must be chosen, and this is the path that I want to follow. I want to show that my faith fits perfectly that double spiritual need, the need for a mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, which the Christian world rightly calls romance."
Migratory pub
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was subject to various genres, but in our country he is known primarily as the author of detective stories about Father Brown. Peru G.K. Chesterton also wrote provocative, adventurous novels about brave, cheerful, and gambling people.
Heroes G.K. Chesterton is captivated by his originality, desire to break out of boring everyday life and unchanging love of life. The one-volume collection of the famous English writer includes his best novels, “The Man Who Was Thursday” and “The Passing Tavern,” as well as a collection of short stories, “The Poet and the Madmen.”
Writer in the newspaper
Readers are well aware of the English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), the author of detective stories and many novels.
The purpose of the collection is to introduce readers to the best examples of Chesterton's journalism. The book includes literary portraits of B. Shaw, C. Dickens, D. Byron, W. Thackeray and other writers, journalistic essays life and morals of Chesterton's contemporary society, essays on moral and ethical topics.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas (otherwise Thomas Aquinas or Thomas Aquinas, lat. Thomas Aquinas) (born in 1225, Roccasecca Castle, near Aquino, died near Naples - March 7, 1274, Fossanuova Monastery, near Rome) - the first scholastic teacher of the church, “princeps philosophorum "("prince of philosophers"), founder of Thomism; since 1879 he has been recognized as an official Catholic religious philosopher who linked Christian doctrine (in particular, the ideas of Augustine) with the philosophy of Aristotle.
Saint Francis of Assisi
The book was written in 1923. Translated from the edition of Chesterton G. K. St. Francis of Assisi. N.Y., 1957. Russian translation completed in the spring of 1963. Published by YMCA-Press in the Bulletin of the RSHD (1975), with omissions and typos, as it was printed from a samizdat manuscript. The published text was verified and prepared for printing in 1988, first published in Russian in the journal “Problems of Philosophy” No. 1, 1989. Translation by N. L. Trauberg. Comments T. V. Vikhor, L. B. Summ.
Charles Dickens
The English writer G. K. Chesterton was not only popular writer, but also a wonderful literary critic.
Dickens was especially fond of him, to whom he dedicated several works. The most interesting is the one offered to the Soviet reader. The beautifully written book consists of twelve chapters telling about Dickens and his era, his life and work, his brilliant gift of imagination. Chesterton's book certainly deepens the idea of a humanist writer and a true democrat.
“The Ball and the Cross” is at the same time an eccentric Robinsonade, a fantastic satirical novel, a debate novel, a feuilleton novel, and a dystopia. In Chesterton's work, people who rise above the earthly are under the control of the police, who are authorized to issue “certificates of normality.” It is curious that the English writer assigned the role of the main resister to the Antichrist to an Athonite Orthodox monk.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his novel "The Ball and the Cross"
Does a Christian have the right to smile? Or is the Orthodox doomed to eternal seriousness and sorrow? For an answer to this question, you can turn to the world of the English writer Gilbert Chesterton.
Chesterton is a Catholic. And this is commendable.
But if you say that Chaadaev is a Catholic, then this (in my value system) will already sound upsetting. And this is not double standards. It’s just that a foot placed on the same step, in one case, lifts the head resting on this foot up, and in another case - it is also on the same step - lowers it down.
Chesterton was born in 1874 in a Protestant country (England) and a Protestant (Anglican). Catholicism is his adult (at forty-eight years old), conscious and protest choice. This is a step in search of tradition.
Modernity repeats: they say, since you happened to be born in my feud, then you, a person, are my property, and therefore deign to look at the world the way I, Radiant Modernity, deign to look...
But the orthodoxy sought by Chesterton is a compensation for the accident of birth: “Tradition expands rights; it gives a voice to the most oppressed class - our ancestors. Tradition does not surrender to the arrogant oligarchy that now happens to live. All democrats believe that a person cannot be deprived of his rights simply because of such an accident as his birth; tradition does not allow human rights to be infringed due to such an accident as death. The democrat demands not to neglect the advice of a servant. Tradition forces you to listen to your father's advice. I cannot separate democracy and tradition; it is clear to me that the idea is one. Let's call the dead to our council. The ancient Greeks voted with stones - they will vote with tombstones. Everything will be completely legal; after all, gravestones, like ballots, are marked with a cross.”
Yes, I can’t help but live in my own, 21st century. But I can live not by what this century has created or destroyed, but by what was revealed to past centuries. Solidarity with tradition provides liberation from the totalitarian claims of modernity, which strives to replace your eyes with its lenses.
So for the author of “The Ball and the Cross,” the transition to traditional Catholicism (let’s not forget that Chesterton lived in an era when the Catholic Church had never even heard of what “agiornamento” was) is a stroke against the tide. This is a step from the newer (anti-clericalism and Protestantism) to the older. A step towards orthodoxy. And if a Russian person accepts Catholicism, then this is a step away from Orthodoxy. The step is the same. But Orthodoxy is now not before your eyes, but behind your back.
The choice of a rebel, a teenager (and a civilization that glorifies youthful fashions) is to run away from home, to turn over the earth. Chesterton's choice is to stay in the house. Even in a house that has leaks.
It’s easy to become a Protestant, create your own denomination and declare that there were no real Christians in the centuries that lay between Christ and you. It’s easy to assent to anti-church critics: ah-ah, the crusades, oh-oh, the persecution of heretics, ah-ah, what bad Christians they all were (and to myself: not like me).
It is more difficult to honestly enter into the tradition. And to say: the history of the Church is my history. Her holiness is my holiness. But her historical sins are also my sins, not “theirs.” To take the side of that Church, even the distant approaches to which are blocked by the barriers of “Inquisition” and “Crusades”, is an act. The act is all the more difficult because at that time this Church itself had not yet tried to lift these barriers with its deliberate repentant declarations.
Chesterton has a remarkable sense of taste: despite his belonging to the Catholic tradition, his work does not reflect specifically Catholic dogmas. As far as I know, he did not write a single line in favor of papal infallibility. I have no reason to say that Chesterton did not believe in this new Vatican dogma. But, being an apologist for common sense, he understood that this thesis can only be believed by making a sacrifice of reason. No, such a sacrifice is sometimes necessary: common sense dictates that sometimes the most sound decision is precisely the sacrifice of oneself: for it is very unsound to believe that the whole world is arranged in complete agreement with my ideas about it. But Chesterton rarely calls for such a sacrifice. And only for the sake of the Gospel, and not for the sake of the Vatican.
And once Chesterton even spoke critically of the judgment that took place in the Catholic tradition. He has an essay entitled: “Good Plots Spoiled by Great Writers.” And in this essay there are these words: “The biblical thought - all sorrows and sins were generated by violent pride, unable to rejoice if it was not given the right to power - is much deeper and more accurate than Milton’s assumption that a noble man got into trouble out of chivalrous devotion to a lady "("Writer in the newspaper." - M., 1984. P. 283).
In Milton, Adam actually pours out his feelings to Eve, who has already sinned: “Yes, I have decided to die with you! How can I live without you? How can we forget our tender conversations, the love that united us so sweetly?” And - according to the poet's assumption - “Without heeding reason, without hesitation, he tasted. Without being deceived, he knew what he was doing, but he broke the ban and was conquered by a woman’s charm” (Paradise Lost. Book 9).
But this is not Milton’s original idea. More than a thousand years before him, this was the same hypothesis of St. Augustine, who believed that Adam submitted for the sake of marital fidelity (and not because he himself was deceived). “The husband followed his wife not because the deceived one believed her as if she was telling the truth, but because he submitted to her for the sake of the marital relationship. The Apostle said: And Adam was not deceived: but the wife was deceived (). This means that she accepted as truth what the serpent told her, but he did not want to separate from the only community with her, even in sin. This did not make him any less guilty; on the contrary, he sinned consciously and judiciously. Therefore, the apostle does not say “he has not sinned,” but says “not to be deceived”... Adam came to the idea that he would commit an excusable violation of the commandment if he did not leave the girlfriend of his life in the community of sin” (On the City of God. 14, 11; 14, 13).
The explanation is beautiful. But still, what remains is only marginalia (a note in the margins) Christian tradition. Chesterton, through the charm of Milton and Augustine, was able to move on to an interpretation of the Fall that is closer to the experience of the Eastern fathers.
In general, Chesterton’s orthodoxy is not a catechism, not a defense of some dogmatic text (Chesterton wrote his “Orthodoxy” thirteen years before his conversion to Catholicism). This is the protection of a value system, a hierarchy of values.
Values without hierarchy are a matter of taste (that is, again dependence on the random influences of modernity on oneself). But even good things must be ordered. The sun and moon should shine differently. Otherwise, the person will lose orientation, spin and fall. Chesterton is sad that “the world is full of virtues that have gone mad.” Things in themselves that are good, but not the main ones, blind with themselves and overshadow everything else. A medicine suitable for the treatment of one disease is recommended under completely different circumstances...
Chesterton intercepts the weapons of church enemies. You are logical - and I will constantly encourage you to be logical. You are ironic - and I will be ironic. You are for a person - and I am for him. Only Christ died for man, and you receive fees for your ostentatious humanism...
What does Chesterton teach? Take your time with “yes” and “no.” Don't be afraid to be in the minority and don't be afraid to be with the majority. The spirit of “heterodoxy” tempts in different ways. Then he whispers: “The Orthodox are in the minority, and therefore why should you be with them, why stand out!” And then suddenly he will come to the other ear and whisper: “Well, how can you, so smart and original, walk in the crowd with the majority? Try the unconventional way!”
Since Chesterton speaks about tradition and on behalf of tradition, his thoughts are not original (those of opponents of tradition are also not original, but in addition they are vulgar).
Chesterton's phenomenon lies not in what, but in how he speaks. He is a restorer who takes a worn, cloudy nickel and cleans it so that it becomes bright again. It would seem that he manages to present Christianity, which has been utterly beaten down over nineteen centuries, as the most recent and unexpected sensation.
Chesterton also knows how to lower himself to the ground. In any polemic, he does not allow himself to soar above his opponent or the reader and begin to water him from above with the oil of instructions and broadcasts.
Maybe this is because he found his faith on earth. He didn't look for signs in the heavens. He just looked carefully at his feet. He loved his land, his England - and noticed that its beauty had been growing through its land for centuries - but from a grain brought from Palestine: “... I tried to get ten minutes ahead of the truth. And I saw that I was eighteen centuries behind her.” That is why Chesterton does not feel like a prophet, a messenger of Heaven. He simply says that the Gospel has been fermenting in the world for so long that if you look with an attentive gaze in any direction, then here on earth you will notice the fruit of this evangelical fermentation. He also says that if the Gospel helped people live and become human in past centuries, then why on earth did it suddenly become considered inhumane today?
This is what makes Chesterton unique. He found what most people have in front of their eyes. As a personal victory, unexpectedly given to him, he perceived what was taken for granted for people of past centuries. You don’t value the earth until it disappears from under your feet.
Chesterton is an unexpected type of man who values home comfort. An inveterate polemicist (who, in his own words, “never in his life denied himself the pleasure of arguing with a Theosophist”) - and a lover of the hearth, an apologist for homesteading. When they want to kick you out of your house onto a protest street, being a homebody turns out to be a free choice in defense of freedom.
Homemaking is a very valuable and vital skill in our time and in our church environment. When leaflets and gossip place apocalyptic explosives under all church and everyday foundations and declare the criterion of Orthodoxy to be the readiness to immediately take off and, hurling anathemas, run into the forests from the “census”, “passports”, “ecumenism”, “modernism”, “lukewarmness” etc., then it is very useful to take a closer look at how you can believe without strain. Believe seriously, believe with your whole life, but without hysteria, without lovely inspiration. How can you conduct a debate without boiling over? How can you talk about pain and still allow yourself to smile?
Chesterton once said that a good man is easy to recognize: he has sadness in his heart and a smile on his face.
A Russian contemporary of Chesterton believed the same: “In thunderstorms, in storms, in the coldness of life, in the event of heavy losses and when you are sad, appearing smiling and simple is the highest art in the world.” This is Sergei Yesenin.
For all his polemics, Chesterton perceives the world of Christianity as a home, and not as a besieged fortress. You just need to live in it, and not fight off attacks. And since this is a residential building, then it may contain something that is not related to military affairs. For example, a baby's cradle. And next to her is a volume of fairy tales.
In the current storm of debate surrounding Harry Potter, I found it very comforting to find several essays by Chesterton in defense of the tale. “And yet, strange as it may seem, many are sure that fairy-tale miracles do not happen. But the one I’m talking about did not recognize fairy tales in another, even more strange and unnatural sense. He was convinced that fairy tales should not be told to children. Such a view (like belief in slavery or the right to colonies) belongs to those incorrect opinions that border on ordinary meanness.
There are things that are scary to refuse. Even if this is done, as they now say, consciously, the action itself not only hardens, but also corrupts the soul. This is how children are denied fairy tales... A serious woman wrote to me that children should not be given fairy tales, because it is cruel to frighten children. In the same way, we can say that sensitive stories are harmful to young ladies, because young ladies cry over them. Apparently, we have completely forgotten what a child is. If you take away gnomes and ogres from a child, he will create them himself. He will invent more horrors in the dark than Swedenborg; he will create huge black monsters and give them terrible names that you will not hear even in the delirium of a madman. Children generally love horror and revel in it, even if they don't like it. Understanding when exactly they really feel bad is just as difficult as understanding when it feels bad for us if we have voluntarily entered the dungeon of a high tragedy. Fear does not come from fairy tales. Fear comes from the very soul.
Fairy tales are not to blame for children's fears; It was not they who instilled in the child the thought of evil or ugliness - this thought lives in him, for evil and ugliness exist in the world. A fairy tale only teaches a child that a monster can be defeated. We have known the dragon since birth.
The fairy tale gives us St. George... Take the most terrible fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm - about a young man who knew no fear, and you will understand what I want to say. There are creepy things there. I especially remember how the legs fell out of the fireplace and walked along the floor, and then the body and head joined them. Well, that's it; but the essence of the fairy tale and the essence of the reader’s feelings are not in this - they are in the fact that the hero was not afraid. The wildest of all miracles is his fearlessness. And many times in my youth, suffering from some current horror, I asked God for His courage” (Essays “Dragon Grandmother” and “Joyful Angel”).
Maybe today's young people will find it easier to understand Chesterton if they watch The Last Samurai. This is a film about the beauty in resisting the new. About the courage it takes to defend “the garden planted by my ancestors.” When I watched this film, when the samurai said that he draws joy from touching the garden that was planted by his family nine hundred years ago, a lump came to my throat. I don't have such a garden. I don't know where my great-grandfathers' graves are. In the apartment where I spent my childhood, complete strangers now live... But I have Orthodox churches.
And I am glad and proud that I am now honored to walk on those slabs on which generations of my ancestors walked, to approach the same icon and, most importantly, to offer the same prayers and in the same language as Yaroslav the Wise and Sergius of Radonezh.
We preserve the faith that was shared in every detail by all of Europe during the first millennium Christian history. We preserve the system of values that breathed in classical European culture, in the novels of Hugo and Dickens, in the music of Bach and Beethoven. Our split with Europe takes place not so much in space as in time. We are related to the Europe that the culture of postmodernism has renounced.
But not all of Europe has renounced its Christian roots. There is a cultural minority in it, a Christian and a thinking minority. This is something you need to be able to notice and appreciate. In a night battle it is easy to confuse friends and enemies. To prevent this from happening, we must not think that everything born in the West and coming to us from the West is obviously hostile and bad. We need to find allies. We must appreciate those works of modern Western culture that swim against the tide of Hollywood. Khomyakov once dreamed: “We will stir up a counter current - against the current!” This is Chesterton's path.
...More than half a century has passed since Chesterton’s pen calmed down. But only one feature of his journalism seems outdated. He shared the sweet prejudice of 19th-century writers who believed in the rationality of their readers and opponents: if my reader is sane and honest, he cannot but agree with the strength of my logic and the clarity of my language!
Today we too often see publicists and politicians who do not consider it necessary to be honest or logical. Hatred of Christianity in Chesterton's time wore a rationalist guise. Now she is much more often openly irrational - cynical or “obsessed”.
In both cases, arguments do not help. In past centuries, the Christian state’s hand cured the selfish cynicism of anti-church people (for it placed the blasphemers in such financial and everyday conditions that it was unprofitable for them to get rid of themselves). And for obsession, the Church in all centuries has known one non-book cure: prayer. Unlike the first recipe, this one is still applicable today.
But there are also just people. Ordinary people, not bought or obsessed. There’s just something they don’t understand about orthodoxy. You can speak to them in the language of people.
On the other hand, while mass ideologies were gaining power in different European countries, Chesterton was able to realize that even the most anti-Christian philosophical and ideological systems were not completely hostile to Christianity. They have a feature close to the church tradition: faith in the power and meaning of the word, the requirement to consciously build one’s life. In the novel “The Ball and the Cross,” the final blow to Christianity is dealt not by heresy, but by thoughtlessness and indifference. Pop music. "Star Factory". A militant atheist - and he turns out to be an ally of Christ and an enemy of the Antichrist, because he insists that the choice of faith more important than choice brands of yogurt.
In the world of "little people", " last people“(Nietzsche and Dostoevsky had a similar eschatological nightmare) the one who seeks and believes in the non-obvious seems abnormal. In Chesterton's novel, such people are under the democratic control of the majority, that is, under the control of the police, who are empowered to issue “certificates of normality.” So, with all his emphatic sanity, Chesterton understood that a Christian must be able to be both a reasoner and a holy fool.
For the Russian reader, it will be especially joyful to know that Chesterton assigned the role of the main resister to the Antichrist to an Athonite Orthodox monk.
Deacon Andrey Kuraev
Gilbert Chesterton
Taken from http://www.pravoslavie.ru/sm/6127.htm
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith(Chesterton, Gilbert Keith) (1874–1936), English writer. Born 29 May 1874 in Kensington, London. Chesterton was baptized on July 1 and named Gilbert in honor of godfather Thomas Gilbert. The middle name is the surname of his maternal grandmother.
Received his primary education at St. Paul's School. After leaving school in 1891, he studied painting at the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator, and also took a literary course at University College London, but did not complete his studies.
In 1896, Chesterton began working for the London publishing house Redway and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period, he also carries out his first journalistic work as a freelancer and literary critic.
In 1900 he published his first book of poems, “The Wild Knight”.
In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, with whom he would live his entire life. At the same time he gained scandalous fame as an ardent opponent of the Anglo-Boer War.
In 1902, he was entrusted with writing a weekly column for the Daily News newspaper, then, in 1905, Chesterton began writing a column for The Illustrated London News, which he wrote for 30 years.
Beginning in 1918, he published the magazine G.K.'s Weekly.
According to Chesterton, as a young man he became interested in the occult and, together with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards, but in 1922 he converted to Catholicism and devoted himself to promoting Christian values.
Chesterton was big man, his height was 1 meter 93 centimeters, and he weighed about 130 kilograms. Chesterton often joked about his size. During the First World War in London, when a girl asked why he was not at the front, Chesterton replied: “If you walk around me, you will see that I am there.” On another occasion, he was talking to his friend Bernard Shaw: "If anyone looked at you, they would think there was a famine in England." Shaw replied: “And if they look at you, they will think that you arranged it.” Once, at a very loud noise, Plum (Sir Pelham Granville) Wodehouse said: “It was as if Chesterton had fallen on a sheet of tin.”
Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to go; it happened that he missed the trains he was supposed to take. Several times he wrote telegrams to his wife Frances Blogg from a place other than where he was supposed to be, saying: “I'm at Market Harborough. Where should I be? To which she answered him: “At home.” Due to these cases and the fact that Chesterton was very clumsy as a child, some people believe that he had developmental dyspraxia.
Chesterton loved debate, so he often had friendly public debates with Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Bernard Shaw played cowboys in a silent film that was never released.
Chesterton showed early interest and talent in art. He planned to become an artist, and his vision as a writer shows an ability to transform abstract ideas into concrete and memorable images. Even in his fiction, parables are carefully hidden.
He defined the “main idea” of his life as awakening the ability to be amazed, to see the world as if for the first time. His artistic “argumentation” was based on eccentricity and an emphasis on the unusual and fantastic. Chesterton's paradoxes were a common sense test of conventional wisdom. An unusually topical writer, a newspaperman in in the best sense of this word, he appeared as a deep and original thinker in historical, literary and theological works. His literary works became true masterpieces: “Robert Browning” (“Robert Browning”, 1903), “Charles Dickens” (Charles Dickens, 1906), “George Bernard Shaw” (“George Bernard Shaw”, 1909), “Robert Louis Stevenson "(Robert Louis Stevenson, 1927) and "Chaucer"(Chaucer, 1932).
Religious and philosophical treatises devoted to the apology of Christianity are also widely known. Theologians pay tribute to his insight in the portrait-life “St. Francis of Assisi" ("St. Francis of Assisi", 1923) and "St. Thomas Aquinas" ("St. Thomas Aquinas", 1933).
Chesterton's excursions into sociology, presented in the books What's Happened to the World? (“What’s Wrong with the World”, 1910) and “The Outline of Sanity”, 1926), made him, along with H. Belloc, a leading promoter of the idea of economic and political decentralization in the spirit of Fabian principles .
Controversy also permeates Chesterton’s fiction; his works “The Napoleon of Notting Hill” (1904) and “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908) are essentially as serious as and the overtly apologetic works “Orthodoxy” (1908) and “The Thing” (1929).
Chesterton traveled widely and gave lectures in Europe, America and Palestine. His radio appearances brought his voice to an even wider audience, but he spent the last twenty years of his life mainly in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where he died on June 14, 1936.
The sermon at Chesterton's funeral service in Westminster Cathedral was preached by Ronald Knox. Chesterton is buried in Beaconsfield Catholic Cemetery.
In Russia, Chesterton is best known for his series of detective stories with the main characters Priest Brown (in translations there are also versions of Father Brown, Father Brown) and Horn Fisher.
Brown's prototype was the priest John O'Connor, an acquaintance of Chesterton who played an important role in the writer's conversion to Catholicism (1922). In 1937, O'Connor published Father Brown on Chesterton.
Detective stories about Father Brown, a simple priest with an unremarkable appearance but a sharp analytical mind, who works wonders in finding criminals by reading in the minds and souls of those around him, have been filmed several times. In one of the film adaptations, the role of Father Brown was played by Sir Alec Guinness. In another, “Face on the Target,” filmed in 1978 at the Lithuanian Film Studio, Povilas Gaidis plays Father Brown.
Two of Chesterton's 6 novels are related to the history of SF. The action of the novel “Napoleon of Notting Hill” (“The Napoleon of Notting Hill”, 1904; Russian translation in 1925 - “Napoleon from the Suburbs”) takes place in a fantastic, idealized patriarchal England, which is essentially a conservative utopia in the spirit of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite artists. And in the best novel of the writer - “The Man Who Was Thursday”, originally published with the subtitle “ Nightmare"("The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare", 1908; Russian translation 1914) - the author, on the contrary, places the action in a nightmarish surreal London - "New Babylon", overrun by agents of a secret society of anarchists, subordinate not just to the leader-messiah, but , as is clear from the hints in the finale, to Christ himself. In general, Chesterton’s complex and “variably readable” novel remains a brilliant example of both detective SF, an elegant mystification in the spirit of absurdist SF, and hard-won reflections on the confrontation between the “natural man” (everyman) and revolutionary terrorists obsessed with messianic ideas.
The ironic story of the Turkish invasion of England is described in the novel “The Flying Inn”, 1914; Russian translation 1927. Chesterton's stories in the SF and fantasy genres are included in the collections - The Man Who Knows Too Much, 1922, Tales of the Long Bow, 1925, Sunshine and Nightmare (Daylight and Nightmare, 1986). The collection “Sunlight and Nightmare”, little known to readers, was already being signed for publication when Jorge Luz Borges died, and the book was dedicated to him. Borges once said about Chesterton: “Chesterton curbed his desire to become Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something integral to his personality constantly leaned towards the nightmarish, the secret, the blind and the important...”
"Sunshine and the Nightmare" can be attributed to two schools of fantasy concepts: the "weird tale" (paranormal fantasy stories) and the "Inklings" (mythopoetic group of Oxford philologists represented by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, who are considered the literary heirs of Chesterton himself). The story "A Crazy Tale" is unusual story in a psycho-allegorical setting comparable to Lovecraft's Cast Away. The story “The Angry Street”, where an entrepreneur, traveling along the same street for 40 years, suddenly finds himself in strange place, on a hill that was not there the day before, the person he meets tells him that today, instead of a station, the street leads to heaven. Thus, Chesterton turns a long-familiar street into a path from “Hansel and Gretel.” A simple city block becomes dangerous uncharted territory, shops turn from dull to magical and mysterious. This method was later used by Lovecraft in The Music of Erich Zann and by Jean Ray in The Shadowy Street. The stories “Concerning Grocers as Gods” and “Utopias Unlimited” are close in content to the anti-realism of Meyrink and Kafka (from the article by Adam Walter “The Weird Fables & Fancies of G.K. Chesterton”)
Among the author’s other works close to the theme of the site, we highlight the story “The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (1937), fairy tales, and the play “The Sorcerer” (“Magic: A Fantastic Comedy”). It is also necessary to note the encyclopedia of demonology “Half-Hours in Hades, an Elementary Handbook on Demonology”
Writer or journalist? Saint or anti-Semite? Detective author or philosopher? One of the most popular English writers is the living embodiment of the paradoxes he loves so much. The new issue on British literature talks about the life and work of Gilbert Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a phenomenon that hardly fits into the usual definitions. His mysteries are often disguised moral parables; biographies of other writers contain observations about the life of the author himself; treatises designed to appeal to logic and common sense are subjective and biased. Chesterton himself, being one of the most popular authors in Britain, did not consider himself a writer - “I never took my novels and stories seriously and do not consider myself, in essence, a writer.” From “Autobiography” (translation by Natalia Trauberg).- and preferred the word “journalist”. Nevertheless, Chesterton had a significant influence on C.S. Lewis and Mahatma Gandhi, Marshall McLuhan and Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman and Pope Francis. Who was this man and how to read his texts?
Biography
Attilio Baccani. Portrait of Gilbert Keith Chesterton as a child The British Library
Members of the "Club of Beginners" G. K. Chesterton is in the center of the photo. 1890 or 1891 Chesterton. RU
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in 1874 into a middle-class London family. His father and brothers ran big company real estate dealer Today, Chestertons, founded by the writer's great-grandfather, is one of the world's largest real estate agencies.. Gilbert attended St. Paul's School, one of London's oldest private schools, and in 1890 founded the Budding Debate Club. The debaters published a homemade magazine, The Debater, in which Chesterton's first works were published. The atmosphere of those years is best conveyed by the comic novel “Our Prospects” (1894), written by members of the club: in it Chesterton and his friends fight a duel, land on a desert island, destroy a police station in St. Petersburg, travel through Siberia and the Himalayas, fight with the Bedouins.
After graduating from school, Gilbert decides to become an artist and studies art for a year at the Slade School at University College London. He will spend the next year there, studying English and French literature. After dropping out of college in 1895, Chesterton began writing for various publications and soon became known as a critic and essayist. In the summer of 1901, he married Frances Blog, and at the same time the first collections of his newspaper essays were published. From 1905 until his death in 1936, Chesterton wrote a column a week for The Illustrated London News: 7 thousand newspaper essays occupy 10 volumes of the 37-volume collected works.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton with his fiancee Frances Blogg. Around 1900 Club Chesterton de Granada
Drawing by Chesterton "The understandable irritation of William Shakespeare (immersed in the composition of Macbeth) in response to a Beaconsfield journalist's request for a reference to a line number in one of his sonnets" Chesterton and Friends
The morals of English writers of that time are well illustrated by the following episode. In 1914, James Matthew Barry, the author of "" who, among other things, was fond of experiments at the intersection of cinema, theater and life, invited Chesterton, Bernard Shaw, theater critic William Archer and philanthropist Lord Howard de Walden to star in a film about cowboys. He dressed everyone up in appropriate costumes, took them out to Essex, and made them spend the whole day chasing wild ponies and climbing rocks, pretending to be cowboys. Another part of the idea was a kind of performance. Barry hosted a dinner at the Savoy in London and invited all the high society there - from writers to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Justice. The invitees (with the exception of the participants in the filming) did not know that they were being filmed by cameramen hired by Barry. The atmosphere was relaxed, high-ranking guests behaved relaxed: Chesterton recalled that “some people were throwing bread, forgetting about state concerns.” After dinner, everyone went into the hall, where the actors entertained the audience with sketches. Then Shaw took the floor. He announced to those present that “the Scotsman will not just treat anyone to a free dinner” and that they are all participating in some unprecedented undertaking. Snatching a fake sword, the writer rushed off stage, calling on people to follow him. Chesterton, Archer and Lord Walden, also armed with swords, followed his example and disappeared from public view. According to Barry, the scene in the Savoy symbolized the departure of the “project” participants from the real world to the world of cinema. However, the guests did not understand anything, and the Prime Minister wrote Barry a letter prohibiting him from showing the recording. The cowboy film was shown publicly once or twice, but in the 1940s all traces of it were lost. But a photograph taken during filming has been preserved.
From left to right: Lord Howard de Walden, William Archer, James Matthew Barry, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Bernard Shaw. 1914 The British Library
Chesterton's drawing with the distributist slogan "Three acres and a cow"The Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton
And in 1917, in one of the London literary salons, Chesterton met with a certain “Russian in military uniform", whose project of transferring power to poets shocked him with its scale and poetic courage. “He spoke in French, incessantly, and we became silent,” Chesterton recalls in his autobiography, “and what he said was quite typical of his people. Many have tried to define this, but the easiest way is to say that Russians have every gift except common sense. He was an aristocrat, a landowner, an officer of the royal guard, completely devoted to the old regime. But something made him similar to every Bolshevik, and moreover, to every Russian I met.” The continuation of the above quote looks like this: “I will say one thing: when he went out the door, it seemed that he could have gone out the window in the same way. He was not a communist, he was a utopian, and his utopia was much crazier than communism. He proposed that poets should rule the world. As he importantly explained to us, he himself was a poet. And besides, he was so courteous and generous that he invited me, also a poet, to become the full-fledged ruler of England. He assigned Italy to D’Annunzio, France to Anatole France. I noticed, in as much French as I could contrast with the flow of his words, that the ruler needed some kind of general idea, but the ideas of France and D’Annunzio were rather - unfortunately for the patriots - directly opposite.” Translation by Natalia Trauberg.. This Russian in military uniform was a poet, who in turn wrote about Chesterton in June 1917 in a letter to Anna Akhmatova: “He is loved here or hated very much - but everyone counts. He also writes poetry, which is very good.” M. Basker, Y. Zobnin, T. Vakhtinova, A. Mikhailov, E. Stepanov. Comments. N. S. Gumilev. Full composition of writings. T. 8. Letters. M., 2007..
By the end of the 1910s, Chesterton was already one of the most famous writers in Britain; by the end of the 1920s, he was well known abroad. He travels with public appearances throughout Europe, and during his trip to the USA in 1930-1931 he gives numerous lectures, which attract large numbers of listeners. “In America, I gave at least 90 lectures to people who had done nothing wrong to me,” he would later write in his Autobiography.
Already in the 1900s, Chesterton became a fighter against unbelief and a defender of Christianity. In 1908, his collection “Orthodoxy” was published, and he increasingly spoke from a Christian position. But Chesterton’s apologetic pathos became especially clear after his adoption of Catholicism in 1922 Before this, Chesterton belonged to the Anglo-Catholics, the branch of Anglicanism closest to Catholicism.: in the 1920s, his book about Francis of Assisi (1923) and “The Eternal Man” (1925) - an essay on the history of mankind from a Christian point of view - were published. In 1933 - a biography of Thomas Aquinas. Expressing his condolences on Chesterton's death in 1936, Pope Pius XI called him a defender of the Catholic faith.
Argumentator and master of paradox
Cartoon by James Montgomery Flagg "G. K. Chesterton always says the wrong things in the right place.” 1914 The Library of Congress
An article about the debate between Chesterton and Bernard Shaw on the topic “Do animals have souls?” in the Manchester Guardian of 15 April 1925Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies
Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton at a public debate. 1927 Wikimedia Commons
Chesterton was a fierce and masterly debater. This was his favorite way of reasoning: he constantly participated in public debates, incredibly common in Britain, argued in newspaper columns and even turned his own biography into polemics with imaginary opponents. The Chesterton family told the story of how Gilbert and his younger brother Cecil once argued for 18 hours without a break. Then there was the “Club of Beginning Debators.” Chesterton argued all his life - with the most different people and for the most different topics. With the philosopher Bertrand Russell - about raising children, with the writer Herbert Wells - about eugenics Eugenics- the doctrine of human hereditary health and ways to improve it, about methods of influencing the hereditary qualities of future generations in order to improve them., with American lawyer Clarence Darrow - about religion. But his most famous opponent, disputes with whom were even published as separate books, was Bernard Shaw.
Chesterton's most characteristic technique, which distinguishes all his texts - from playful essays and detective stories to treatises in defense of the Christian faith - is paradox. In this sense, he is the successor of the tradition to which both belonged, but if for the first the destruction of logic as such is important, and for the second - wit brought to perfection, the Chestertonian paradox is a tool for returning to common sense. Chesterton extols eccentrics and eccentricities not at all out of a desire for extravagance: he sees that the modern world has been turned upside down and it is possible to maintain balance in it only by standing on your head.
Chesterton's talkativeness, his irrepressible love of paradoxes, his desire to start an argument at the right time and inappropriately were much and cruelly criticized. The poet Thomas Eliot, an implacable opponent of Chesterton, who appreciated him only towards the end of his life, wrote: his mind “swarms with ideas, but does not think,” his style is “irritating to the point of unbearability,” and his readiness to argue with everyone and about everything gives the impression that “ The reader's beliefs are always directly opposed to what Mr. Chesterton considers to be true."
Collections of Chesterton's articles against eugenics or divorce give an idea of how dull and prejudiced his polemical fervor can look when directed at a specific social ill. But this is rather an exception. The best examples of Chesterton's polemics fascinate, as brilliantly constructed battle scene. Lewis writes about this well in his autobiography Overtaken by Joy:
“I didn’t need to agree with Chesterton to enjoy him. His humor is the kind that I like best. These are not “witticisms” distributed across the page like raisins in the dough of a bun, and certainly not a predetermined tone of careless jokes that one cannot bear; humor here is inseparable from the very essence of the dispute; the dialectic of the dispute “blooms” with it, as Aristotle would say. The sword plays in the rays of the sun not because the fencer cares about it, it’s just that the fight is going on in earnest and the movements are very agile.” Lewis K. S. Collected works in 8 volumes. T. 7. M, 2000..
Chesterton the poet
Gilbert Keith Chesterton at the age of 13. 1887 or 1888 University of California Chesterton began writing poetry while still at St. Paul's School and even won the Milton Prize for his poem about St. Francis Xavier. True, he was so distracted that he forgot the award on stage There were legends about Chesterton's absent-mindedness: he tried to open the door with a corkscrew instead of a key, buy coffee at ticket office and tickets to a cafe, and during one of the trips he allegedly sent his wife a telegram with the question: “I am in Market Harborough. Where should it be?. Technically, his poems remained school-based: in an age when English poetry had largely moved away from regular meter and rhyme into experiments with free verse and the play of allusions, Chesterton composed poems that were very traditional in form with simple rhymes.
Chesterton's complete poetry is two volumes of 500 pages; much was published after the author's death. The most significant of his poems are “The Ballad of the White Horse” and “Lepanto”. The first is dedicated to the battle of Alfred the Great, the first Anglo-Saxon king of Britain, with the pagan Danes, the second to the battle of Don Juan of Austria with the Turks. Chesterton views both events as an allegory of the opposition between civilization and barbarism, faith and unbelief, life and death. Image white horse, an ancient drawing on the chalk hills of Oxfordshire, Chesterton turns into a symbol of the European Christian tradition: this silhouette has survived to this day, because generation after generation cleared its outlines, not allowing it to be overgrown with turf - so our ideas about good and evil, duty, shrine, loyalty and righteousness mean something only insofar as generation after generation works to clear them, to protect them from the “new trends” that seek to kill them.
One of Chesterton’s most poignant poems is put into the mouth of the main character of the novel “The Passing Tavern”, Captain Dalroy. It is dedicated to the image of returning home, important for Chesterton, as a metaphor for the recovery of a lost and crazy universe, human society and an individual. Chesterton plays on a tradition that actually exists in the English Parliament, according to which, at the end of the meeting, ministers ask the audience: “Who is going home?” In Chesterton’s work, this completely banal journalistic quip about politicians (“Why aren’t they being beaten now?” asks one of the characters in “The Flying Tavern,” and another replies: “This is a great secret”), with the help of poetic hyperbole, turns into a piercing philosophical and theological generalization.:
In a city surrounded by impenetrable darkness,
They ask in parliament who is going home.
Nobody answers, the house is not on the way,
Yes, everyone died, and there was no one to go home.
But people will still wake up, they will atone for their guilt,
For our Lord has pity on his sick country.
Dead and risen, do you want to go home?
Having lifted up your soul, do you want to go home?
You'll hurt your legs, waste your strength, break your heart,
And your body will be covered in blood when you reach home.
But a voice calls through the years: “Who else wants freedom?
Who else wants to win? Go home!"
Author of biographies
Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Cartoon by Mark Weiner. 1931 National Portrait Gallery, London Chesterton wrote the first biographical book about the poet and playwright Robert Browning in 1903. Like other texts, it is subjective and polemical. The author honestly admitted that what he wrote could hardly be called a book about Browning: “I wrote a book about freedom, poetry, love, my opinions about God and religion (exceptionally immature), where from time to time the word “Browning” appeared, which I introduced quite skillfully, at least with decent regularity. There were some facts there, almost all of them were wrong. But there is something in this book, more likely my youth than Browning’s life.”
This characterization largely applies to all biographies written by Chesterton. In this self-review there is a grotesque characteristic of the author: of course, he did not deliberately distort the facts and did not try to pass off his own conjectures as biographical research. But still, he chose as the heroes of his books those with whom he somehow felt a kinship and therefore knew how to make them closer to the reader. The critic and priest Ronald Knox called the biography of Dickens “Chestertonian philosophy, illustrated with examples from the life of Dickens,” the book about Thomas Aquinas was to a great extent a declaration of love for the Latin Middle Ages, and about Chaucer for the English 14th century.
Chesterton himself honestly admitted the limitations of his knowledge, clarifying that his book is for those “who know even less about Chaucer than he does.” Indeed, on the one hand, these texts clearly tell the general reader about an era or a specific writer. On the other hand, such a strict connoisseur as Thomas Eliot called Chesterton's "Charles Dickens" the best written about Dickens, the French philosopher and theologian Etienne Gilson, the main expert on Thomas and Thomism, also highly appreciated the biography of Thomas Aquinas, and the strict critic Harold Bloom - the book about Chaucer.
The lack of distance between the author and the subject of research, which many consider so necessary, is the most striking feature of Chesterton's research method, equally attracting some readers and repelling others. This was best formulated by the same Ronald Knox in a sonnet written on the writer’s death:
"He cried with me," Browning said,
“Laughed with me,” Dickens picked up,
“With me,” Blake noted, “he played,”
“With me,” Chaucer admitted, “he drank beer,”
“With me,” exclaimed Cobbett, “he rebelled,”
“With me,” Stevenson said, “He read in the human heart,”
“With me,” said Johnson, “he held court.”
And he, who had barely appeared from the earth,
I waited patiently at the gates of heaven,
As truth itself awaits,
Until the wisest two came.
“He loved the poor,” Francis said,
“He served the truth,” said Thomas Translation by Anatoly Yakobson..
At the end of his life, Chesterton intended to write a book about Shakespeare, but he never got around to it.
Novelist
Gilbert Keith Chesterton at work. 1905 University of California Until 1989, Chesterton was thought to have written six novels. However, after the death of his secretary Dorothy Collins, the seventh and earliest novel, written when the author was 19 years old, was discovered among the writer's papers. The publishers called this text “Basil Howe”: it tells the love story of two young people, and although the main character sprinkles quite recognizable Chestertonian paradoxes, in general it is more of an imitation of Victorian novels than an independent work.
Chesterton's first and completely original novel, “Napoleon of Nottinghill” (1904), is imbued with the author’s characteristic love for the Middle Ages and the London suburbs. In an alternative reality England (where kings are chosen by lot), a newly appointed eccentric king decides to return the medieval rights of self-government to the London boroughs, and the city plunges into internecine wars, reviving the virtues of chivalry.
In “The Man Who Was Thursday” (1908), an attempt to uncover a conspiracy of underground terrorists turns into a touch on the mystery of the universe. “The Ball and the Cross” (1909) - a story about irreconcilable opponents, whose indifference to the truth, among the triumphant indifference, makes best friends, and “Man Lives” (1912) is the story of returning home as a dangerous and adventurous undertaking. In “The Flying Tavern” (1914), prohibition is declared in England, and rum lovers lead the people to storm parliament, and in “The Return of Don Quixote” (1927), the production of an amateur play about the times of Richard the Lionheart leads to a change in the political system, librarian becomes king and, imbued with the true spirit of the Middle Ages, decides to give the factories to the workers and the mines to the miners.
The specificity of Chesterton's novel is most visible in the novel “The Man Who Was Thursday.” A hero, poet and policeman fighting anarchists is infiltrated into a secret organization planning an assassination attempt on three world leaders. It gradually becomes clear that its members, who call themselves for the purpose of secrecy by the days of the week, are in fact secret agents from the department for combating anarchists, and the leader Sunday, both a policeman and an anarchist, embodies order and chaos, creation and destruction. Poetic hyperbole, representing a bunch of conspirators as a mysterious world evil that threatens the destruction of human civilization itself, and the police as the last force protecting the world from collapse, allows the author to simultaneously rebel against bourgeois calm (anarchists and police officers are the only truly living forces in the world) and diagnose romanticism of destruction.
In his strange and seemingly absurd fantasies, Chesterton anticipates such important authors of the 20th century as Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges (both highly regarded The Man Who Was Thursday). But if for them the world turning upside down is only scary or absurd, then Chesterton looks at this absurdity with love.
Detective author
Illustration by Sidney Seymour Lucas for the story "The Ignorance of Father Brown." 1911 Project Gutenberg Chesterton is best known for his detective stories, although he himself never took them seriously and considered this activity to be deeply secondary (as is quite often the case in the history of literature). What is even more interesting is that, although many consider detective stories to be the best that Chesterton wrote, and these stories themselves have long become classics of the genre, these are not so much detective stories as moral parables dressed in detective form.
However, Chesterton's fame as a detective author is also quite unique. Popular stories about Father Brown account for about half of the texts written in this genre. The other half is much less known. In addition to the collection “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1922) The main character Horn Fisher, an amateur detective who belongs to high society and knows its morals better than others, solves crimes, but cannot bring the criminals to justice., Chesterton wrote collections of short stories, The Surprising Crafts Club (1905) and The Poet and the Madmen (1929). The early collection “Hunting Stories” (1905) and the later “The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond” (1936), especially appreciated by Borges, are the element of paradox in its purest form, the detective plot here is either secondary or simply absent. Chesterton himself considered his best detective story to be “The Five of Swords” (1919), which is not part of any of the series.
Father Brown, based on a real Catholic priest, Chesterton's friend John O'Connor, solves crimes not because he is interested in forensic science, but because he knows better than any detective the sinfulness of human nature. In addition (and this is one of Chesterton’s main theses), faith is the last refuge of reason in the modern world. “You attacked reason,” Father Brown tells the distinguished and later repentant criminal Flambeau in the story “The Sapphire Cross.” “This is bad theology.”
What makes these stories brilliant from a detective point of view is Chesterton's trademark paradoxical nature. A plot built on paradox requires a much more logical and rational construction than ordinary story. In the story “The Face on the Target,” a phenomenally accurate shooter, a subtle and cunning man, hides under the guise of an absurd upstart and a well-known asshole throughout the area. In “The Disappearance of Mr. Vaudry,” a sweet old gentleman who is apparently being blackmailed by some dark figure turns out to be the fiend of hell, and his brutal murder is the result of protecting a desperate victim. It is here that Chesterton openly states this principle of his: “Artists often turn drawings over to check their accuracy. Sometimes, if it is difficult to turn over the object itself (say, a mountain), they even stand on their heads.”
The best of Chesterton's stories combine the paradoxical nature unique to him with an atmosphere of mystery worthy of Edgar Poe, Dickensian flavor ("The Flying Stars") and social pointedness ("Strange Steps").
Christian apologist, anti-Semite, saint
Caricature by J. Cohen of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. 1912 Getty Images Chesterton's numerous speeches in defense of Christianity and the Catholic Church made him one of the most notable Christian apologists of the 20th century. His role in his conversion to faith was noted by C. S. Lewis and the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and he played a special role for the believing intelligentsia in the USSR in the 1960s and 1970s. Chesterton is called one of the favorite authors of Pope Francis (according to some versions, his choice of this particular name is due to Chesterton’s biography of Francis of Assisi).
In 2013, the Catholic Bishop of Northampton, Peter Doyle, commissioned Father John Udris to find grounds for canonizing Chesterton. This study, the first stage of the canonization process, was completed in the summer of 2018, and its results were transmitted to the Vatican. And in connection with this, interest in the problematic aspects of Chesterton’s legacy has intensified, the main one of which remains the accusation of anti-Semitism.
Chesterton did not consider Jews inferior to others because of their nationality. But he shared, especially in his youth, the prejudice against Jewish plutocracy that existed among English liberals Plutocracy(from the Greek “wealth” and “power”) - a regime in which political power is usurped by a wealthy minority. as a financial force that harms the economy and especially the poor. In 1912, Chesterton actively acted on the side of his brother Cecil in the so-called Marconi affair, a corruption scandal involving financial abuses of senior members of Parliament in which Jewish financiers were involved. Chesterton called the “Jewish problem” the fact that Jews are a people deprived of a homeland, who feel everywhere in a foreign land: “foreigners, only those who are not recognized as foreigners.” Hence his speeches in defense of the Jewish state In 1919 he visited Palestine at the invitation of the British Zionist Association. and against the participation of high-ranking Jews in peace negotiations with Germany at the end of the First World War. Hence the proposals to oblige Jews to wear oriental clothing in the book “New Jerusalem” (1920), which sounded so scary in the light of later events.
On the other hand, given the number of texts Chesterton wrote and his passion for polemics, it is difficult to find a community that would escape criticism from him - from Muslims and Buddhists to various Christian denominations and English liberals. In addition, he spoke out a lot in defense of Jews - protecting his friends (several of his closest friends were Jews) from school bullying, raising his voice against pogroms in Russia and Poland; he traveled to Palestine, and while in Poland, visited the synagogue. Finally, in a 1933 interview, Chesterton, while acknowledging the existence of a “Jewish problem,” at the same time strongly condemned “Hitler’s atrocities” and said that he was “ready to die defending the last Jew of Europe.”
Chesterton in Russia
Performance by the Chamber Theater based on the novel by G. K. Chesterton “The Man Who Was Thursday.” Directed by Alexander Tairov. 1923 Moscow Drama Theater named after A. S. Pushkin
Chairman of the Chesterton Society Natalia Trauberg's cat Innocent Cotton Gray. Late 1970s© Natalia Trauberg / trauberg.com
Cover of the collection of articles by G. K. Chesterton “The Writer in the Newspaper.” Moscow, 1984Publishing house "Progress"
The story of Chesterton in Russia is a separate and important story. In the 1910-20s, progressive youth read him; his eccentricity and leftism rhymed with post-revolutionary Russian reality. In 1923, Alexander Tairov staged a reworking of “The Man Who Was Thursday” by playwright Sigismund Krzhizhanovsky on the stage of the Moscow Chamber Theater. The performance glorified the energy of the reconstruction of the world, anarchism triumphed, but the details of the plot were lost behind the massive constructivist scenery. Upon learning of this, Chesterton was deeply outraged.
But by the end of the 1930s, Chesterton’s eccentricities began to look dangerous, and they stopped translating and publishing him in the USSR. He returned at the very beginning of the 1960s thanks to Natalia Trauberg, who translated his essays and treatises for samizdat. “Chesterton was our antidote in the 1950s and 1960s,” she wrote in Memoirs of Father Alexander Men. — First of all, of course, his apology for joy was opposed to unresolved grief. Such a rare combination in our century of home and freedom, centripetal and centrifugal, eschatological lightness and cosmic thoroughness taught us not to rush either “to the left” (which would be completely natural) or “to the right”, beyond the boundaries of Christianity.”
Soviet reality was absurd enough (and its comparisons with Kafka became quite common) that Chesterton’s standing on his head in the name of common sense again turned out to be the most adequate form of preserving oneself and confronting this reality. Today it is difficult to imagine how the lines “our Lord has pity on his sick country” were read in those years (there was some hooliganism here: in the original in this place “For God has pity on this great land”). Gradually, Chesterton became not only and not so much an author writing about the problems of his time, but a symbol and password for samizdat readers. In May 1974, on Chesterton's centenary, the Chesterton Society was founded in a Moscow apartment. Its chairman was Natalia Trauberg's cat named Innocent Cotton Gray (gray cat Kesha), among the first members were Trauberg herself, philologist and future academician Sergei Averintsev, poet, literary critic and translator Vladimir Muravyov.
In the 1970s, as censorship gradually weakened, edited samizdat translations began to appear in print—first stories and essays, and then novels and apologetic treatises. The first and, perhaps, still the best collection of various examples of the writer’s work in one small volume was the collection “The Writer in the Newspaper,” published in 1984.
Chesterton's translations, including in audiobook format, can be found completely free and completely legally on the website charitable foundation"Tradition".
Images: Gilbert Keith Chesterton. 1933
© Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Sources
- Averintsev S. Chesterton, or the Surprise of Sanity.
G. K. Chesterton. Writer in a newspaper: artistic journalism. M., 1984.
- Chesterton G.K. Autobiography.
- The Unexpected Chesterton: Stories. Essay. Fairy tales. Comp. Natalya Trauberg.
- Ahlquist D. G. K. Chesterton: Apostle of Common Sense.
San Francisco, 2003.
- Chesterton G.K. Basil Howe: A Story of Young Love.
- Conlon Denis J. G. K. Chesterton: A Reappraisal.
- Ker I. G. K. Chesterton: A Biography.
- Ward M. Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
English Gilbert Keith Chesterton
English Christian thinker, journalist and writer late XIX- early 20th centuries
Gilbert Chesterton
short biography
- English writer, poet, journalist, Christian thinker, outstanding representative of the detective genre - was born in London Kensington on May 29, 1874. Being the son of Catholic parents, he received his primary education at the Jesuit school of St. Pavel, a very prestigious educational institution. In his youth, he planned to connect his life with art, mastered the art of painting at the Slade Art School, intending to become a book illustrator in the future. Seriously interested in poetry, he attended literary courses organized by University College London, but did not complete his studies.
In 1896, Chesterton's career began: he got a job at one of the London publishing houses. In 1900, with the publication of two collections of poetry - “Old Men Playing” and “The Wild Knight” - Herbert Keith Chesterton joined the ranks of writers. His first appearances in the field of journalism date back to this time. Having taken on the task of writing a series of articles on art, Chester realized that journalism seemed to him a very exciting activity.
These years turned out to be rich in various events in his life. In the early 1900s. Chesterton attracted public attention to his person by speaking out against the Boer War. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, who remained his wife all her life. In 1902, Chesterton became the host of a weekly column in the Daily News, and in 1905 he began similar work in the Illustrated London News, and his articles appeared there for three decades.
Chesterton was a very original person; his unusualness was manifested even in his appearance. He was a real hero, weighed 130 kg and had a height of 2 m, which was the subject of constant jokes about himself. Among his many works there is also an autobiography, from which, in particular, it is known that in his youth he and his brother Cecil became seriously interested in the occult and tried to conduct spiritualistic seances. However, as he matured, he became a devout Catholic. At one time, Chesterton wanted to become an artist; his love for art and certain abilities in this area remained with him throughout his life. He wrote that in one of the films he and Bernard Shaw had the opportunity to play cowboys, but this film was never released. Chesterton had a weakness for debate, so public friendly discussions often brightened up his leisure time; in addition to the already mentioned B. Shaw, B. Russell, G. Wells and others participated in them.
Chesterton remained original in his work; his legacy includes about 80 books. Gilbert Keith wrote 6 novels, the most popular of which were “The Man Who Was Thursday” and “Napoleon of Notting Hill,” 200 short stories, several hundred poems, short stories, and a number of dramatic works. The detective series starring Father Brown, an amateur sleuth, directed G.K. Chesterton among the classics of the detective genre. His legacy of another kind is no less great and varied. He is the author of 4,000 essays, literary monographs on B. Shaw, Stevenson, Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and the author of a number of treatises of a religious and philosophical nature on the topic of Christianity.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton died on June 14, 1936, while in Beaconsfield (Buckinghamshire), and was buried there in the Catholic cemetery.
Biography from Wikipedia
Gilbert Keith Chesterton(eng. Gilbert Keith Chesterton; May 29, 1874, London, England - June 14, 1936, Beaconsfield (English), England) - English Christian thinker, journalist and writer of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. Knight Commander with star of the Vatican Order of St. Gregory the Great (KCSG).
Chesterton was born on May 29, 1874 in Kensington, London. He received his primary education at St. Paul's School. Then I studied fine arts at the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator, and also took a literary course at University College London, but did not complete his studies. In 1896, Chesterton began working for the London publishing houses Redway and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period, he also carries out his first journalistic work as a freelancer and literary critic. In 1901, Chesterton married Frances Blog, with whom he lived his entire life.
In 1902, he was entrusted with writing a weekly column for the Daily News, then in 1905, Chesterton began writing a column for The Illustrated London News, which he wrote for 30 years.
According to Chesterton, as a young man he became interested in the occult and, together with his brother Cecil, once experimented with a Ouija board. However, he soon became disillusioned with such activities, turned to Christianity, and later became a Catholic. Christian faith left a deep imprint on all his works.
Chesterton showed early interest and talent in art. He planned to become an artist, and his vision as a writer shows an ability to transform abstract ideas into concrete and memorable images. Even in his fiction, parables are carefully hidden.
Chesterton was a big man, he was 1 meter 93 centimeters tall and weighed about 130 kilograms. He often joked about his size. During the First World War, a girl in London asked him why he was not "far on the front line"; Chesterton replied: “If you come in from the outside, you will see that I am quite at home there.” On another occasion, he told his friend Bernard Shaw: “If anyone looked at you, they would think there was a famine in England.” Shaw replied: “And if they look at you, they will think that you arranged it.” One day, during a very loud noise, Pelham Granville Woodhouse said:
It was as if Chesterton had fallen onto a sheet of tin.
Chesterton often forgot where he was supposed to go; it happened that he missed the trains he was supposed to take. Several times he wrote telegrams to his wife Frances Blog from a place other than where he was supposed to be, with the following content: “I am at Market Harborough. Where should I be? To which she answered him: “At home.” Due to these cases and the fact that Chesterton was very clumsy as a child, some people believe that he had developmental dyspraxia.
Chesterton loved debates, so he often participated in friendly public disputes with Bernard Shaw, Herbert Wells, Bertrand Russell, and Clarence Darrow. According to his autobiography, he and Bernard Shaw played cowboys in a silent film that was never released. Chesterton's great friend was Hilaire Belloc, with whom he also argued a lot. Gilbert Keith also met with the famous Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov during his stay in London.
In 1914-1915, Chesterton suffered a serious illness, and in 1918, his brother Cecil, who participated in the First World War, died in France. The following year the writer made a trip to Palestine; at the beginning of 1921 he went to America to lecture.
In the last years of his life, Chesterton, despite poor health, continued to work, including on the newspaper he inherited from his brother, and traveled to Italy and Poland; At the same time, he began performing on the radio.
The writer died on June 14, 1936 in Beaconsfield (Buckinghamshire), where he lived with his wife and adopted daughter. The funeral mass was presided over by the Archbishop of Westminster. The sermon at the funeral service in Westminster Cathedral, held on June 27, was read by Ronald Knox. Chesterton is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Beaconsfield.
"He cried with me," Browning said,“Laughed with me,” Dickens picked up,
“With me,” Blake noted, “he played,”
“With me,” Chaucer admitted, “he drank beer,”“With me,” exclaimed Cobbett, “he rebelled,”
“With me,” Stevenson said, “
He read in the human heart"
“With me,” said Johnson, “he held court.”And he, who had barely appeared from the earth,
I waited patiently at the gates of heaven,
As truth itself awaits,Until the wisest two came.
“He loved the poor,” Francis said,
“He served the truth,” said Thomas
Creation
In total, Chesterton wrote about 80 books. He is the author of several hundred poems, 200 short stories, 4000 essays, a number of plays, the novels “The Man Who Was Thursday”, “The Ball and the Cross”, “The Flying Tavern” and others. He is widely known for his series of detective stories with the main characters priest Brown and Horne Fisher, as well as religious and philosophical treatises on the history and apology of Christianity.
- Robert Browning ( Robert Browning, 1903),
- Charles Dickens ( Charles Dickens, 1906),
- Robert Louis Stevenson ( Robert Louis Stevenson, 1927)
- Chaucer ( Chaucer, 1932).
- St. Francis of Assisi ( St. Francis of Assisi, 1923)
- St. Thomas Aquinas ( St. Thomas Aquinas, 1933)
- What happened to the world? ( What's Wrong with the World, 1910)
- Contours of common sense ( The Outline of Sanity, 1926)
- Napoleon of Nottinghill ( The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904)
- The Man Who Was Thursday ( The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908)
- George Bernard Shaw ( George Bernard Shaw, 1909)
- Eternal Man ( The Everlasting Man, 1925)
- Orthodoxy ( Orthodoxy, 1909)
- This ( The Thing, 1929).
- Amazing Crafts Club ( The Club of Queer Trades, 1905)
- The man is alive ( Manalive, 1912)
- Migratory pub ( The Flying Inn, 1914)
- Five of swords ( The Five of Swords) / The Man Who Knew Too Much ( The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1922)
- Three weapons of death ( Three Tools of Death) / Ignorance of Father Brown ( The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)