A truly talented person must be talented in everything. Confirmation of these words - Joseph Rudyard Kipling. The biography of this man, in particular, the fact that he received the Nobel Prize at the age of forty-two is evidence of this. The writer, poet and literary man loved people and nature, was interested in everything, read a lot. He was courageous, always took a clear social and political position. He believed that there is a "noble fear" that should be shared by all people - for the fate of another person. A British upbringing, he always considered India, whose language he knew, as his second homeland.

What works made Kipling famous?

As you know, British poetry is one of the richest in talents in the world: George Gordon Byron, William Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold. Therefore, the choice of the English public for the attempt of the famous BBC radio station to name their favorite poems is indicative. The primacy (and by a significant margin!) Belonged to Kipling's "Commandment". However, he is no less known all the same as a prose writer. Kipling's work is multifaceted. The most significant of his works are the novel "Kim" and the collection of stories "The Jungle Book".

The lines of this writer are picturesque. Indeed, The Jungle Book can rightfully be called prose in verse. This is how our classics Turgenev and Gogol wrote, but, of course, about Russia. The 15-story mosaic of The Jungle Book consists of the story of Mowgli, uniting 8 of them, and other stories about the human-endowed about the brave mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, about a cat that walks by itself. The story of the Kipling boy Mowgli, raised by a pack of wolves, about his confrontation with the cruel tiger Sherkhan was repeatedly displayed in cartoons and is familiar to all children.

Childhood of the writer

Kipling became famous for his stories about India. His biography begins in Bombay, where he was born in 1936. In India passed his country he knew and loved. The strongest, most vivid childhood impressions of the son of the rector of the Bombay School of Arts are associated with the magical stories of an Indian nanny about animals (the boy understood and knew how to speak Hindi).

At the age of six, he was sent to England, to a private boarding school, according to Kipling's biography. For children accustomed to free colonial life, it was often difficult to get used to the boarding drill. He was not the hostess's favorite. Memories of the injustice and cruelty that the writer faced in his youth, he later presented in the short story "The Black Sheep".

Youth

At first, my father believed that young Kipling should become an officer. Biography testifies that as a thirteen-year-old boy he was admitted to the Devonian School (in fact, an analogue of our Suvorov School), which is a kind of springboard for future officers wishing to enter well-known military academies. Boyish "graters", bruises and "mini-battles" with bully classmates - all this should have gone through in the men's team, before being recognized as "our". Joseph fell in love with school and service. This period of his life is described in the collection of stories "Stalki and Co". There his talent as a writer was manifested. At the same time, poor eyesight did not leave hopes for a military career. The father recalled the 17-year-old young man to India, where a position was found for him in the Civil and Military Gazette.

Getting started writing

It is from the journalistic path that the stories of R. Kipling originate. His collection "Department Notes" is a success. The aspiring writer is fluent in the Hindustani language, he is close to the Indian reader, he is understood and loved. The 34-year-old writer, already famous in Britain, comes to London to "make a name for himself." Here, in collaboration with the American Walcott Balestier, the publisher, Kipling is working on the story "Naulahka". Biography, a brief chronology of his life during this period is the most interesting. He found a true friend and, moreover, fell in love with his sister. However, their joint work did not last long. After his partner dies from typhus, he marries his sister Caroline. He writes his famous poems "Gunga Din" and "Mandalay".

Vermont period

The young couple moved to where the two-volume "Jungle Book" and the collection of poems "The Seven Seas" are being published. Here, the happy parents had two daughters, then a son. Kipling's best novel, Kim, about an Indian ragamuffin boy who learned Buddhist wisdom and became a British intelligence officer, was created. After a quarrel with his wife's relatives, the thirty-three-year-old writer and his family moved to New York. Here he and his daughter fall ill with pneumonia, after which the girl dies.

Moving to Britain

For several months he works for a South African newspaper, then buys a private house in England, in Sussex. He is actively involved in political life, supporting conservatives. Recognition comes to him: the Nobel Prize, honorary degrees from British and European universities. But again a great loss awaits the writer. His son is killed at the front of the First World War. The writer and his wife devote all their time to helping people in the Red Cross. He hardly writes, so great is the grief. However, soon Kipling finds a friend who managed to "shake him" and awaken him to life. They became ... the English king (Kipling was unusually friendly with this man until the end of his days.) The biography of the writer testifies to how he immortalized the memory of his son, at the age of fifty-eight, writing the story "The Irish Guards during the Great War." The life of this writer was not easy, creative triumphs, unfortunately, were often accompanied by the loss of loved ones. The gastritis that tormented him developed into a peptic ulcer. He died of internal bleeding, buried in

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Kipling's work is multifaceted. We know him thanks to the bright and magical children's stories from The Jungle Book. However, there is another side to his works. called it "English Balzac". The novel "Kim" is rightfully considered the best work about India in English. Kipling was respected and respected by adults, especially during the First World War. Our classic Konstantin Simonov noted Kipling's “courageous style”, his “soldier's severity”, “masculine principle”.

Indeed, could an unmanly person say that a man should not be “stopped” and “penetrated into the soul” of triumphs and failures, that he must always treat them “detached”.

Rudyard Kipling- English writer, poet and short story writer. His best works are "The Jungle Book" (about Mowgli), "Kim", as well as numerous poems.

Kipling was the first Briton to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

For the next 6 years, Rudyard Kipling and his sister lived in a boarding house, where the boy was treated very badly. The teacher was so strict and domineering that she repeatedly beat Kipling and intimidated him in every possible way.

Rudyard Kipling as a child

As a result, this seriously affected his further biography. From the time of school until the end of his days, Kipling will suffer from insomnia.

When, a couple of years later, the mother came to visit the children, she was shocked by the appearance of her son.

He was intimidated and nearly blinded by anxiety. In this regard, the mother decided to pick up the children from the boarding house and return back to India.

The next educational institution of Rudyard Kipling was the Devon School, the director of which was a friend of their family. An interesting fact is that it was he who instilled in the young man a love for.

At this time of biography, Kipling became seriously interested in reading books. When he was 12 years old, he started wearing glasses.

Despite the severity and ignorance of the people around him, Rudyard was able to courageously endure all the trials and after 5 years successfully graduate from college.

Over time, the young man acknowledged that it was not something bad for the child, but on the contrary - it helps him to develop good manners and qualities.

Due to poor eyesight, Rudyard Kipling was unable to continue his military career. However, this did not upset him at all. Instead, he took up writing.

When his father read some of his stories, he realized that his son had talent and helped him get a job as a journalist for a newspaper.

Rudyard Kipling with his father

Soon a significant event took place in Kipling's biography. He was admitted to the Masonic lodge, which will play an important role in his life.

Biography of Kipling

One of Kipling's first works was School Lyrics. Three years later, his collection "Echoes" was published, in which he imitated famous poets and experimented with style.

In the 80s, he works as a reporter, and in his spare time he writes poetry and writes stories. Many of them are published in newspapers.

Having worked as a journalist for 7 years, Rudyard Kipling has gained invaluable writing experience.

He repeatedly witnessed many interesting and often dangerous situations, and was also able to observe the behavior of people belonging to different social strata of society.

All this helped him in the future to convey the images of his heroes in bright colors.

Kipling strove to write short but meaningful stories. Interestingly, he did everything possible to have no more than 1200 words in his stories. It was in this style that the work "Simple Stories from the Mountains" was written.

After a while, the publication in which Kipling worked, invited him to write a series of stories about different states. He gladly accepted this proposal and began to study with interest the culture of the peoples of Asia and America.

Inspired by this success, Kipling embarks on a trip to, and North America.

Personal life

In 1892 Rudyard Kipling married Caroline Bailesir, who was the sister of a good friend of his.

After the wedding, the newlyweds set off on a journey, but soon unpleasant news reached them. It turned out that the bank where Rudyard kept his money had gone bankrupt.

Rudyard Kipling and his wife Caroline

As a result, they barely had enough funds to return home. Nevertheless, this sad event in Kipling's biography did not break him.

Thanks to his gift as a writer and tireless hard work, he was able to earn again the amount of money that allowed him to support his family in full prosperity.

In the marriage, Rudyard Kipling had three children: the girls Josephine and Elsie, as well as the boy John. The writer loved his children to unconsciousness and composed fairy tales just for them.

Against the background of a happy family life, a misfortune happened in Kipling's biography: his eldest daughter died of pneumonia, which was a real shock for Kipling.

Soon, his son, who participated in the First World War (1914-1918), also died. The tragedy with his son was aggravated by the fact that John's body was not found.

As a result, of the three Kipling children, only Elsie's daughter survived, who lived a long life.

Death

Since 1915, Kipling suffered from gastritis, but later it turned out that he actually had a stomach ulcer.

Rudyard Kipling died on January 18, 1936 at the age of 70. The cause of his death was a perforated ulcer.

Kipling's body was cremated, and the ashes were buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. An interesting fact is that another great English writer is buried next to him.

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Igor KLEKH

Igor Yurievich KLEKH - prose writer, essayist; laureate of literary prizes, including those named after Yuri Kazakov.

Little "iron Rudyard"

Have you heard what happened to good old poor England?

It burst like a balloon or a fable toad when they tried to pull the island onto the globe. Everything was OK while Britain was the “ruler of the seas”, after Spain with Holland, but as it came to land management, the islanders were unable to cope with continental metaphysics (hence its historical rivalry with France and persistent rejection of any land power - be it Germany with Russia or China with India). The British attempt to rule the world turned into the cultivation of strife, which ultimately destroyed the Empire, over which the sun never set.

On the verge of its decline, the British Empire gave birth to two prominent figures - its belated ideologue Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and its last pilot, Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who survived its downfall. The irony of fate is that both became laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature - the first before the First World War, in 1907, the second after the end of the Second World War, in 1953. And this is true: empires come and go, leaving only a long mark in the memory - literature. Churchill was involved here in order to understand the scale of the era and the caliber of people who came to service it and see it off on its last journey.

But let's turn to Kipling - and start with his biography. Let's try to consider the figure of fate hidden behind the facts and understand why Rudyard Kipling became what he became. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was a pre-Raphaelite-influenced decorator, sculptor and draftsman. These English forerunners of Art Nouveau, Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Secession and our World of Art rejected European painting, starting with Raphael. Their work was dominated by line and flowing outlines, rather than color, lighting and perspective, and the emphasis was on an exotic plot and exquisite craft. Roughly speaking, it was the Grand style of decorative arts, addressed to the propertied class.

It is curious that Kipling's father and son will become co-authors of a joint work - a luxurious literary and artistic publication “Man and Beast in India”. But first, John Lockwood must decide to leave England and open an art and craft school in Bombay - in order to become a prosperous artist from a poor artist and feel that he belongs to the caste of masters. For a metropolitan, this was the easiest and most reliable career.

Rudyard was born in Bombay into a family of English colonialists, just six years after the suppression of the Sepoy uprising, when the rebels were executed by tying them to the muzzles of cannons. Nevertheless, the first six years of his own life forever remained in Kipling's memory and consciousness as a stay in paradise: an eternal summer in a big house, where parents, Indian servants and pets all loved and adored their little master, who managed to master the local dialects no worse. than native English. Reflection of this idyllic side of childhood, lost paradise, is found in more than one work of Kipling for children and adults (who does not remember the fairy tale "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"?). But the “karma” of little Rudyard was such that six years of hell and five years of purgatory awaited him, and India had nothing to do with it. A custom was adopted in empires - more precisely, a savage method was invented: to excommunicate children from their parents in order to raise faithful servants from them within the walls of closed educational institutions - cruel, strong-willed and at the same time obedient. Nothing special or new: in the same way, the Indians have been breaking the will of immature elephants from time immemorial, turning them into working elephants, obedient to their master (Kipling has a wonderful story about this, "Moti Guj, the Rebel").

Guided by custom, the parents themselves sent the young Rudyard and their younger sister to England to a distant relative who agreed to take other people's children into foster care. And she turned out to be a prude with sadistic inclinations, which was not at all uncommon in Protestant and Catholic countries (suffice it to recall the images of torturers of children, all kinds of saints, in the autobiographically colored films of the great European directors - Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel). This period of life in the “House of Despair” was reflected, apart from his autobiography, only in one story by Kipling with the telling title “Ma-uh, black sheep ...”. Apparently, life experience was too traumatic, where physical suffering from punishment looked like sheer babbling against the background of mental torture and sophisticated bullying. What could the boy think? Only - that his relatives betrayed him, abandoned him, punished for some unknown reason, and this is already irreparable in a hated world that does not know mercy.

A relative drove eleven-year-old Rudyard to mental breakdown when she forced him to go to school with a “liar” sign on his chest. He fell seriously ill, almost went blind, and, perhaps, would have died, if the maternal instinct had not suddenly awakened in his mother. She came to England, took him with his sister from a relative for rehabilitation, rented a house in the countryside for three months.

And when the children had time to believe that “now we are mothers again”, I sent Rudyard to a men's school - with iron discipline, corporal punishment, hazing and other traditional vices of closed educational institutions (for example, James Joyce, for example, in the novel “Portrait of an Artist in youth ”describes how this very future artist in a Jesuit college comrades dunk their heads in the toilet). For a small, puny and short-sighted book reader Kipling, staying within the walls of a male school was not much easier than being raised by a relative. But, oddly enough, from here he came out as a fully matured statesman, who recognized the rationality of the corporate spirit, faceless social structure and organized violence, which reliably protects the members of the corporation from the amateur terror of any distant relatives. As a young man, Kipling joined one of the Masonic lodges, and made the glorification of the imperial spirit and the prosperity of the British Empire his religion.

Since the family did not have the funds to continue their education in the metropolis, Rudyard had to return to his small homeland - no longer to Bombay, but to Lahore in the north of the country, where his father was now in charge of the local art school and the museum of Indian art. A capable, educated and ambitious young man became a correspondent and regular contributor to the Lahore Civil-Military Newspaper and the Allahabad Pioneer. After six years of heaven, six years of hell, and five years in purgatory, Rudyard now faced seven fat years of intense journalistic and literary work. By the end of this period, all English-speaking India read him, he published collections of stories and poems here, which were sold on all the railways of the country. His reports, stories, poems were read in Simla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, from where he ruled India for most of the year. The prestige and competence of the young Kipling was appreciated by the British so highly that the Commander-in-Chief, Earl Roberts of Kandahar, consulted with him on some difficult issues.

The meeting with the forgotten homeland freed Kipling from the lingering nightmare of his school years and awakened the forces that were dormant in him. Having plunged headlong into the maelstrom of Indian life, he turned from a bookworm into a gambling journalist, a prolific writer, and then a prince of English-language Indian literature. Kipling is experiencing an unprecedented creative surge (only in 1888 he published five large and small collections of stories!) And swears before our eyes. And all because, being forcibly pulled out of his environment at the age of impressions and returned to it at the age of action, he was able to see his homeland with a “soapy” look - from the inside and from the outside at the same time. This life somersault and focus of perception allowed Kipling to become the ideal “tool” for describing India. From the pages of his works, everyday characters poured onto the reader, who acquired flesh, blood and voice thanks to Kipling: doctors, detectives, engineers, British officers and soldiers (in his famous "Barracks Ballads" and marching marches such as "Dust", in stories) , colonialists and their children drinking intoxicated in an alien climate, outwardly uncomplaining Indian mistresses and servants, even beasts - real (as in the story of the killer orangutan "Bimi") and fabulous (as in the two "Jungle Books", which have become the golden classics of world children's literature , - is it a joke, a man alone, out of his head, created a whole mythology, an animal epic!).

Journalism taught Kipling to express himself briefly and clearly, without sticking out his "I". And India taught that it cannot be understood by reason - not that it was so complicated, but simply arranged on other grounds (and Kipling defined this civilizational confrontation more energetically than anyone else, in the immortal lines “West is West, East there is an East, and they will not leave their places ", but immediately proposed a forceful and therefore incorrect solution to the problem:" But there is no East, and there is no West, that a tribe, homeland, clan, // If a strong with a strong face to face at the edge of the earth is getting up? ”- in a romance very similar to a thug's“ Ballad of East and West ”, in Russian translation by E. Polonskaya).

From this sense of the ambiguity of life in its most elementary manifestations and focus on borderline experience, Kipling's best stories grew, having a tremendous impact on short story masters around the world. In them there is no enumeration with oriental exoticism and journalism (as in the early stories and essays of Kipling), there is no pathos (inherent even in his best poems), but there is a lot of coarse, to the best of the cruel truth of everyday life, vitality and specific bitterness, which makes one suspect the author of the presence of wisdom not conveyed by words.

With all the difference in temperaments and circumstances of life, Kipling in his short stories turns out to be somewhat close ... to our Chekhov. A focus on the fact of life, brevity and noble simplicity, both were taught by newspaper work. Both introduced into fiction a lot of characters, types, estates that were not previously admitted to it, voiceless - which made a stunning impression on contemporary readers. And in the best stories of both, something most important remained behind the words - in the subtext, as they will call it in the twentieth century.

It is interesting that Kipling and Chekhov, one might say, crossed paths. This, of course, is not about a personal meeting (and what could they say to each other ?!), but about the figures of fate. With a difference of a year, both took a semi-circular journey in opposite directions.

Thirty-year-old Chekhov put himself to the test of frontier experience in a journey through Siberia to the convict Sakhalin - and was fed up with exotic impressions and unforgettable experiences when returning home across three oceans. Finding almost no reflection in his artistic work (because a passion for exoticism, exploitation of extreme situations and pathos are characteristic, as a rule, of provincials, marginalized and infantile), this acquaintance with the huge, inhuman, dangerous and beautiful world allowed Chekhov's talent to achieve a complete maturity. And it is noteworthy that a century later, not Rudyard Kipling, but Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is the most beloved writer of the British after Shakespeare, who have long since said goodbye to their own Empire, somewhat shrunken, partly matured.

By the age of twenty-four, Kipling felt that he was cramped in colonial India, and his ambition was not satisfied. He wanted the same loud fame in the metropolis, and he went to conquer it. Unlike Chekhov, he was already a fairly wealthy journalist and writer (since in the 19th century the British had the highest literary fees in the world - the empire was richer and educated readers were immeasurably). Nevertheless, Kipling agreed with the Allahabad "Pioneer" to publish on its pages a report on his journey - from India through Burma, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States to England. From these correspondences the book of travel prose "From Sea to Sea" was formed, a magnificent example of a genre so beloved in the Western world. The chapters about the Japanese tea ceremony, about visiting the famous Chicago slaughterhouses are just small literary masterpieces.

Kipling left India forever and never returned to it - in life, but not in creativity. India was for him his home, undying love, synonymous with life and death - and he cut it off at a stroke! - while the rest of the world was a foreign land for Kipling, even good old England (or maybe it was she). The metropolis soon gave him everything he so passionately desired: worldwide fame, wealth and power over people (this miserable substitute for love).

HG Wells, who himself became the idol of the reading public in the first third of the twentieth century, recalled: “Perhaps no one has yet been so frenziedly raptured at first, and then, with his own help, so inexorably overthrown. But in the mid-1890s, this small man in glasses, with a mustache and a massive chin, gesticulating vigorously, shouting something with boyish enthusiasm and calling for action by force, lyrically reveling in the colors, colors and aromas of the Empire, made an amazing discovery in the literature of various mechanisms, all kinds of waste, lower ranks, engineering and jargon as a poetic language, has become almost a national symbol. He amazingly subjugated us to himself, he hammered ringing and persistent lines into our heads, made many - including myself among them, albeit unsuccessfully - to imitate himself, he gave a special coloring to our everyday language ”.

This recognition allows one to imagine the power of enchantment and the magnitude of Kipling's fame after moving to the metropolis. Although the native British always treated him as a stranger and an upstart, and even worse - as an Anglo-Indian (there was such a word then), that is, in part, a barbarian. Having taken the place of “the main national poet” after the death of Alfred Tennyson (who composed the motto of our Komsomol members: “Fight and seek, find and not give up!”), Kipling at first himself would have liked to gain fame in the metropolis, but to settle in some other place. A spontaneous attempt to settle in North America, where he even managed to get married, failed. Vermontans were shy about their eccentric neighbor, riding his bike like a boy, but always dressing for dinner. He parted with his wife, his daughter died, his wife's relatives tortured him with lawsuits. In South Africa, too, it did not work out - the house he bought there Kipling left behind as a summer residence. In the very center of London, he had an apartment, but there was no life, so he bought himself a country house in southern England and turned it, in full accordance with English tradition, into a gloomy fortress in which time stood still. Among the well-meaning and loyal British, his authority remained indisputable.

The officers tried to imitate the valiant and brutal heroes of his soldier and sailor stories and songs, the children adored his fairy tales, but the cultural elite very soon lost interest in him, after the Boer War and such poems as "The White Burden" turned away, and with the outbreak of the First World War began to trample. And she had every right to do so. Kipling's son (also karma) died at the front, which did not temper patriotic fervor at all and did not muffle the war cries of the “iron Rudyard”. One can imagine how those who were destined to serve as “cannon fodder” or, at best, become “the lost generation”, hated his imperial “courageous” bravado in the trenches. Writer of this generation, Richard Aldington, summed up the sobering obsession of Kipling's loyal readers: "In fact, it meant serving as a resigned ass when you are kicked into hell."

How much restrained rage towards the belligerent short man in these words of the front-line soldier! It is characteristic that a similar sobering happened with Kipling's translator in Soviet Russia Konstantin Simonov at the beginning of World War II: “On the very first day at the front in 1941, I suddenly fell out of love with some of Kipling's poems once and for all. Kipling's military romance, everything that, bypassing the essence of poetry, bribed me in him in my youth, suddenly ceased to be related to this war, which I saw, and to everything that I experienced. All this in 1941 suddenly seemed distant, small and deliberately tense, like a breaking boyish bass ”.

The perception of Kipling in Russia, the ebb and flow of interest in his work is an extremely interesting topic. Back in 1916, a twenty-volume collection of his works in Russian translations was published. They read them, imitated him, Gumilyov, Babel, Bagritsky, Tikhonov studied with him, the same Simonov, Paustovsky, Gaidar, Zhitkov - you can't count all of them.

In the thirties before the war, this “bard of imperialism” was published and republished in our country like no one else. There was interest from below, and an order was issued from above: a cruel and active time wanted to make heroism the norm of life, so that they would not be afraid of death and had something to patch holes. Meanwhile, we had our own tradition of treating borderline experience and exoticism, completely devoid of colonial romance - sober, truly courageous and truly poetic. With Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time", with Tolstoy's military and Caucasian stories and novellas (Kipling was a great admirer of Tolstoy), with Kuprin's army tales, with "The Lord from San Francisco" and other stories by Bunin, it is only a stretch to put a number of dozen short stories Kipling, on the strength. However, this is already a lot.

In fact, Kipling has long turned into a writer for children and adolescents - these will always read him. In the maturing stage, it is very important for us to deal with a black and white picture of the world, constantly measure ourselves against each other, get infected with the team spirit and dream of adventure. But part of Kipling's creative legacy retains its lasting value for an adult as well. Some very unpleasant, archaic and cruel truth about life and the structure of our world is contained in his best works.

Even with colonial pathos, the situation is not so simple. We somehow too frivolously strive to forget or even not know at all about the monstrous customs of the not so long past.

About mass human sacrifices among the Mayans and Aztecs (until the conquest of their kingdoms by the Spaniards, the priests continued to open the chest with obsidian knives and rip out the living heart from tens of thousands of captives with their hand, they worked tirelessly all day long, the altars were in growths of caked blood and the stench stood, as in a slaughterhouse - the cruel conquistadors did badly from the sight that opened up to them), about the general cannibalism in South America and on the islands of Oceania (who was Robinson afraid of, and who ate Cook ?!). German fairy tales, in which children were left in a dense forest, or Russian folklore, where old people were lowered on bast sleds into a snowy ravine at the end of a long winter, these are not “oral folk art”, but echoes of terrible everyday memories. Roughly the same was the norm in rural Japan as early as the middle of the 19th century. Not long before the birth of Kipling, the British in India managed, if not to eradicate, then at least to prohibit the ceremony of self-immolation of widows ...

You can continue the list or object and argue endlessly, but critics of the vices of Western civilization would do well not to forget about all this. Kipling was not a hypocrite - he called violence violence, cruelty - cruelty - which already appeals to a serious reader. In addition to real colonialism, to the narrow-minded and hardened colonialists, he was extremely critical. Kipling promoted “smart” imperialism, hoped for the emergence of a new, “healthy” youth (she appeared ... in Germany and the Soviet Union) - but he allowed himself only in journalism, poetic manifestos and heroic ballads. Declarations are inappropriate in fictional prose - that is why even Kipling's spy novel "Kim" is considered by the Indians themselves to this day one of the best books written about India. Fortunately, in art, in fiction, only this is taken into account over the years: is it possible and necessary to read “this”? The reader of the "grown-up" Kipling himself can be convinced that he will have an exciting and serious reading, which does not happen very often.

And in life - what in life? Kipling, who had long outlived his glory, was buried in 1936 by the British "establishment" - the prime minister, bishop, admiral and general, and even a few old friends. There were no colleagues, readers, or the public at all. And only when the writer stopped bothering everyone with his sermons, and his ashes rested next to the ashes of Dickens in Poets' Corner at the cemetery of Westminster Abbey, those around them woke up and woke up. For more than half a century, there has been a debate in Britain: how to separate the “good” Kipling from the “bad”? And what is the mystery of the vitality of his art? And where does such power of enchantment come from?

There is no doubt that Kipling himself would not have been able to answer these questions.

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Igor KLEKH

Igor Yurievich KLEKH - prose writer, essayist; laureate of literary prizes, including those named after Yuri Kazakov.

Little "iron Rudyard"

Have you heard what happened to good old poor England?

It is curious that father and son Kiplinga will become co-authors of a joint work - a luxurious literary and artistic publication "Man and the Beast in India". But first, John Lockwood must decide to leave England and open an art and craft school in Bombay - in order to become a successful artist from a poor artist and feel that he belongs to the caste of masters. For a metropolitan, this was the easiest and most reliable career.

Rydyard was born in Bombay into a family of English colonialists, just six years after the suppression of the Sepoy uprising, when the rebels were executed by tying them to the muzzles of cannons. Nevertheless, the first six years of his own life forever remained in Kipling's memory and consciousness as a stay in paradise: an eternal summer in a big house, where parents, Indian servants and pets all loved and adored their little master, who managed to master the local dialects no worse. than native English. Reflection of this idyllic side of childhood, lost paradise, is found in more than one work of Kipling for children and adults (who does not remember the fairy tale "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"?). But the “karma” of little Rudyard was such that six years of hell and five years of purgatory awaited him, and India had nothing to do with it. A custom was adopted in empires - more precisely, a savage method was invented: to excommunicate children from their parents in order to raise faithful servants from them within the walls of closed educational institutions - cruel, strong-willed and at the same time obedient. Nothing special or new: in the same way, the Indians have been breaking the will of immature elephants from time immemorial, turning them into working elephants, obedient to their master (Kipling has a wonderful story about this, "Moti Guj, the Rebel").

Guided by custom, the parents themselves sent the young Rudyard and their younger sister to England to a distant relative who agreed to take other people's children into foster care. And she turned out to be a prude with sadistic inclinations, which was not at all uncommon in Protestant and Catholic countries (it is enough to recall the images of torturers of children, all kinds of saints, in the autobiographically colored films of the great European directors - Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel). This period of life in the “House of Despair” was reflected, apart from his autobiography, only in one story by Kipling with the telling title “Ma-uh, black sheep ...”. Apparently, life experience was too traumatic, where physical suffering from punishment looked like sheer babbling against the background of mental torture and sophisticated bullying. What could the boy think? Only - that his relatives betrayed him, abandoned him, punished for some unknown reason, and this is already irreparable in a hated world that does not know mercy.

Since the family did not have the funds to continue their education in the metropolis, Rudyard had to return to his small homeland - not to Bombay, but to Lahore in the north of the country, where his father was now in charge of the local art school and the museum of Indian art. A capable, educated and ambitious young man became a correspondent and regular contributor to the Lahore Civil-Military Newspaper and the Allahabad Pioneer. After six years of heaven, six years of hell, and five years in purgatory, Rudyard now faced seven fat years of intense journalistic and literary work. By the end of this period, all English-speaking India read him, he published collections of stories and poems here, which were sold on all the railways of the country. His reports, stories, poems were read in Simla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, from where he ruled India for most of the year. The prestige and competence of the young Kipling was appreciated by the British so highly that the Commander-in-Chief, Earl Roberts of Kandahar, consulted with him on some difficult issues.

Journalism taught Kipling to express himself briefly and clearly, without sticking out his “I”. And India taught that it cannot be understood by reason - not that it was so complicated, but simply arranged on other grounds (and Kipling defined this civilizational confrontation more energetically than anyone else, in the immortal lines “West is West, East there is an East, and they will not leave their places ", but immediately suggested a forceful and therefore incorrect solution to the problem:" But there is no East, and there is no West, that the tribe, homeland, clan, // If a strong with a strong face to face at the edge of the earth gets up? ”- in a romance very similar to the thieves' Ballad of East and West, in Russian translation by E. Polonskaya).

With all the difference in temperaments and circumstances of life, Kipling in his short stories turns out to be somewhat close ... to our Chekhov. A focus on the fact of life, brevity and noble simplicity, both were taught by newspaper work. Both introduced into fiction a lot of characters, types, estates, previously not admitted to it, voiceless - which made a stunning impression on contemporary readers. And in the best stories of both, something most important remained behind the words - in the subtext, as they will call it in the twentieth century.

Thirty-year-old Chekhov put himself to the test frontier experiences on a journey through Siberia to the convict Sakhalin - and got fed up exotic experiences and an unforgettable experience when returning home across three oceans. Finding almost no reflection in his artistic work (because a passion for exoticism, exploitation of extreme situations and pathos are characteristic, as a rule, of provincials, marginalized and infantile), this acquaintance with the huge, inhuman, dangerous and beautiful world allowed Chekhov's talent to achieve a complete maturity. And it is noteworthy that a century later, not Rudyard Kipling, but Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is the most beloved writer of the British after Shakespeare, who have long said goodbye to their own Empire, somewhat shrunken, partly matured.

And from India, Kipling left forever and never returned to it - in life, but not in creativity. India was his home, undying love, synonymous with life and death - and he cut it off at a stroke! - while the rest of the world was a foreign land for Kipling, even good old England (or maybe it was she). The metropolis soon gave him everything he so passionately desired: worldwide fame, wealth and power over people (this miserable substitute for love).

HG Wells, who himself became the idol of the reading public in the first third of the twentieth century, recalled: “Perhaps no one has yet been so frenziedly raptured at first, and then, with his own help, so inexorably overthrown. But in the mid-1890s, this small man in glasses, with a mustache and a massive chin, gesticulating vigorously, shouting something with boyish enthusiasm and calling for action by force, lyrically reveling in the colors, colors and aromas of the Empire, made an amazing discovery in the literature of various mechanisms, all kinds of waste, lower ranks, engineering and jargon as a poetic language, has become almost a national symbol. He amazingly subordinated us to himself, he hammered ringing and persistent lines into our heads, made many - including myself among them, albeit unsuccessfully - to imitate himself, he gave a special coloring to our everyday language ”.

This recognition allows one to imagine the power of enchantment and the magnitude of Kipling's fame after moving to the metropolis. Although the native British always treated him as a stranger and an upstart, and even worse - as an Anglo-Indian (there was such a word then), that is, partly a barbarian. Having taken the place of “the main national poet” after the death of Alfred Tennyson (who composed the motto of our Komsomol members: “Fight and seek, find and not give up!”), Kipling at first himself would have liked to gain fame in the metropolis, but to settle in some other place. A spontaneous attempt to settle in North America, where he even managed to get married, failed. Vermontans were shy about their eccentric neighbor, riding his bike like a boy, but always dressing for dinner. He parted with his wife, his daughter died, his wife's relatives tortured him with lawsuits. In South Africa, too, it did not work out - the house he bought there Kipling left behind as a summer residence. In the very center of London, he had an apartment, but there was no life, so he bought himself a country house in southern England and turned it, in full accordance with English tradition, into a gloomy fortress in which time stood still. Among the well-meaning and loyal British, his authority remained indisputable.

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O ficery sought to imitate the valiant and brutal heroes of his soldier and sailor stories and songs, the children adored his fairy tales, but the cultural elite very soon lost interest in him, after the Anglo-Boer War and such poems as "The White Burden" turned away, and with the outbreak of the First World War war began to trample. And she had every right to do so. Kipling's son (also karma) died at the front, which did not temper patriotic fervor at all and did not muffle the war cries of the “iron Rudyard”. One can imagine how those who were destined to serve as “cannon fodder” or, at best, become “the lost generation”, hated his imperial “courageous” bravado in the trenches. Writer of this generation, Richard Aldington, summed up the sobering obsession of Kipling's loyal readers: "In fact, it meant serving as a resigned ass when you are kicked into hell."

In the perception of Kipling in Russia, the ebb and flow of interest in his work is an extremely interesting topic. Back in 1916, a twenty-volume collection of his works in Russian translations was published. They read them, imitated him, Gumilyov, Babel, Bagritsky, Tikhonov studied with him, the same Simonov, Paustovsky, Gaidar, Zhitkov - you can't count all of them.

Even with colonial pathos, the situation is not so simple. We somehow too frivolously strive to forget or even not know at all about the monstrous customs of the not so long past.

On the mass human sacrifices among the Mayans and Aztecs (until the conquest of their kingdoms by the Spaniards, the priests continued to open the chest with obsidian knives and rip out the living heart from tens of thousands of captives with their hand, they worked tirelessly all day long, the altars were in growths of caked blood and the stench stood, as in a slaughterhouse - the cruel conquistadors did badly from the spectacle that opened up to them), about the general cannibalism in South America and on the islands of Oceania (who was Robinson afraid of, and who ate Cook ?!). German fairy tales, in which children were left in a dense forest, or Russian folklore, where old people were lowered on bast sleds into a snowy ravine at the end of a long winter, these are not “oral folk art”, but echoes of terrible everyday memories. Roughly the same was the norm in rural Japan as early as the middle of the 19th century. Not long before the birth of Kipling, the British in India managed, if not to eradicate, then at least to prohibit the ceremony of self-immolation of widows ...

You can continue the list or object and argue endlessly, but critics of the vices of Western civilization would do well not to forget about all this. Kipling was not a hypocrite - he called violence violence, cruelty - cruelty - which already appeals to a serious reader. In addition to real colonialism, to the narrow-minded and hardened colonialists, he was extremely critical. Kipling promoted "smart" imperialism, hoped for the emergence of a new, "healthy" youth (she appeared ... in Germany and the Soviet Union) - but he allowed himself only in journalism, poetic manifestos and heroic ballads. Declarations are inappropriate in fictional prose - that is why even Kipling's spy novel "Kim" is considered by the Indians themselves to this day one of the best books written about India. Fortunately, in art, in fiction, only this is taken into account over the years: is it possible and necessary to read “this”? The reader of the "grown-up" Kipling himself can be convinced that he will have an exciting and serious reading, which does not happen very often.

And in life - what in life? Kipling, who had long outlived his fame, was buried in 1936 by the British "establishment" - the prime minister, bishop, admiral and general, and even a few old friends. There were no colleagues, readers, or the public at all. And only when the writer stopped bothering everyone with his sermons, and his ashes rested next to the ashes of Dickens in Poets' Corner at the cemetery of Westminster Abbey, those around them woke up and woke up. For more than half a century, there has been a debate in Britain: how to separate the “good” Kipling from the “bad”? And what is the mystery of the vitality of his art? And where does such power of enchantment come from?

There is no doubt that Kipling himself would not have been able to answer these questions.

Joseph Redyard Quipling(eng. Joseph Rudyard Kipling - / ˈrʌdjərd ˈkɪplɪŋ /; December 30, 1865, Bombay - January 18, 1936, London) - English writer, poet and short story writer.

His best works are The Jungle Book, Kim, and numerous poems. In 1907, Kipling becomes the first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the same year, he received awards from the universities of Paris, Strasbourg, Athens and Toronto; also awarded honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Durham universities.

Kipling's works are characterized by a rich language full of metaphors. The writer has made a great contribution to the treasury of the English language.

Biography

Childhood

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, British India, the son of John Lockwood Kipling and Alice (McDonald) Kipling, a professor at the local art school. He received the name Rudyard, it is believed, in honor of the English lake Rudyard, where his parents met. The early years, full of exotic sights and sounds of India, were very happy for the future writer. But at the age of 5, together with his sister, he went to study in England. For six years he lived in a private boarding house, whose owner (Madame Rosa) mistreated him, punished him. This attitude influenced him so much that he suffered from insomnia for the rest of his life.

At the age of 12, his parents put him in a private Devon school so that he can then enter the prestigious military academy. (Later, about the years spent at the school, Kipling will write an autobiographical work "Stalki and Company"). The headmaster of the school was Cormell Price, a friend of Rudyard's father. It was he who began to encourage the boy's love for literature. Myopia did not allow Kipling to choose a military career, and the school did not give diplomas for admission to other universities. Impressed by the stories written at the school, his father finds him a job as a journalist for the Civil and Military Gazette, published in Lahore (British India, now Pakistan).

In October 1882, Kipling returned to India and took up the job of a journalist. In his spare time, he writes short stories and poems, which are then published by the newspaper along with reports. The work of a reporter helps him to better understand the various aspects of the colonial life of the country. The first sales of his works began in 1883.

Writing career

In London, he meets a young American publisher, Walcott Balestier, and they work together on The Naulahka. In 1892, Balestier dies of typhus, and shortly thereafter, Kipling marries his sister Caroline. During the honeymoon, the bank where Kipling had savings went bankrupt. The couple had money left only to get to Vermont (USA), where Balestier's relatives lived. They live here for the next four years.

At this time, the writer again begins to write for children; the famous The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book were published in 1894-1895. The poetry collections The Seven Seas and The white thesis have also been published. Two children are soon born: Josephine and Elsie. After a quarrel with his brother-in-law, Kipling and his wife returned to England in 1896. In 1897, the novel Captains Courageous was published. In 1899, during a visit to the United States, his eldest daughter Josephine died of pneumonia, which was a huge blow to the writer.

In 1899, he spent several months in South Africa, where he met Cecil Rhodes, a symbol of British imperialism. The novel "Kim" (Kim) is published, which is considered one of the best novels of the writer. In Africa, he begins to select material for a new children's book, which comes out in 1902 under the title Just So Stories.

In the same year, he buys a country house in Sussex (England), where he remains until the end of his life. Here he writes his famous books Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies - tales of Old England, united by the elf storyteller Pak, taken from Shakespeare's plays. Simultaneously with his literary activity, Kipling begins an active political activity. He writes about the impending war with Germany, speaks out in support of conservatives and against feminism.

World War I time

Literary activity is becoming less and less saturated. Another blow to the writer was the death of his eldest son John in the First World War in 1915. In 2007 British filmmakers made a television film "My Boy Jack" about this (directed by Brian Kirk, starring David Haig and Daniel Radcliffe). Kipling and his wife worked in the Red Cross during the war. After the war, he became a member of the War Burial Commission. It was he who chose the biblical phrase "Their names will live forever" on the obelisks of memory. During one trip to France in 1922, he met the English king George V, with whom a great friendship was later struck.

The era of travel

In the mid-1980s, Kipling began touring Asia and the United States as a correspondent for the Allahabad newspaper Pioneer, with which he was contracted to write travel essays. The popularity of his works is rapidly increasing, in 1888 and 1889 6 books with his stories were published, which brought him recognition.

In 1889 he made a long trip to England, then visited Burma, China, Japan. He travels across the United States, crosses the Atlantic Ocean and settles in London. He is beginning to be called the literary heir of Charles Dickens. In 1890, his first novel, The Light That Failed, was published. The most famous poems of that time were The Ballad of East and West and The Last Rhime of True Thomas.

The last days of a writer

Kipling continued his literary career until the early 1930s, although he was less and less successful. Since 1915, the writer suffered from gastritis, which later turned out to be an ulcer. Rudyard Kipling died of perforation of an ulcer on January 18, 1936 in London, 2 days earlier than George V. Buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

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