T.A. Ryzhova
Mark Twain House Museum: Impressions

Premonitions

City of Hartford - a place between New York and Boston. I am going to the Mark Twain Museum in a comfortable two-story hotel room and am not even surprised by my morning red-haired guest, because I have been waiting for something special since the evening. A premonition of good things made me ready to smile. But good signs do not leave me: on the path, almost at the writer's house, two gray hares huddled to the ground. They didn’t even raise their ears - you go to yourself and go. I'm coming!

The fence as part of the celebrations did not arise by chance. When communicating with the Americans, I have repeatedly seen in them a constant desire to start or support the game, whether it is the development of some important project or the holding scientific conference, and, of course, at a party and when visiting an exhibition or museum.

""Merka - 2!""

Tom Sawyer was born here

Neighbor and 13 cats

"The Gorky Incident"

Hartford - Nizhny Novgorod Ten years Nizhny Novgorod State Museum of A.M. Gorky maintains creative and friendly relations with the Mark Twain Museum in the USA (Connecticut, Hartford), which began with a visit to the American Museum by the director of the museum A.M. Gorky Tamara Alexandrovna Ryzhova.

The proposed essay contains observations and notes related to the American Literary Memorial Museum, which is similar and in many ways completely different from museums in Russia.

Premonitions

We both froze, looking at each other: Suddenly her tail flashed in front of my nose and flew somewhere higher. That unexpected springy squirrel jump from an open hotel window in Hartford is remembered as part of my American autumn. It was impossible to imagine a golden age richer than ours, but autumn America is painted differently: it seems that the trees have the same red or yellow color, but brighter than ours, without shades. A sky saturated with blueness, lemon or scarlet foliage are combined into a colorful impressionistic sketch. Everything around took on a single exotic attire, reminiscent of the war paint of the natives - it is not by chance that the local autumn is called Indian.

City of Hartford - a place between New York and Boston. I am going to the Mark Twain Museum in a cozy two-story hotel room and am not even surprised by my morning red-haired guest, because I have been waiting for something special since the evening. A premonition of good things made me ready to smile. But good signs do not leave me: on the path, almost at the writer's house, two gray hares huddled to the ground. They didn’t even raise their ears - you go to yourself and go. I'm coming!

And since I am not a casual spectator in the museum, having read something, prepared, I am looking for what is known to me: the stump of that biblical giant oak, which, as I know, once stood at Mark Twain's house and was felled with a saw in the year of the writer's anniversary . The oak lay, as I read, by the road with two stumps of branches, ""like a crucifix after Golgotha"". On the pages of our press, this oak tree was turned into a symbol of America's misunderstanding of Mark Twain's depth. In our country, the organizers of the anniversary were suspected of wanting to dissolve the memory of the democratic fighter, freedom lover and realist in amusing trifles. America was reproached for making a spectacle out of Mark Twain, a satirist who despised acquisitiveness, a fighter against racism, with "lovers to stick the American flag in foreign land", a spectacle - a wax figure for Mac Island, a pleasure park on the Mississippi.

From living newspaper descriptions, I imagined this endless stream of millions of onlookers chewing gum and paying five dollars to watch dubious miracles: “River disasters. Steam engine. Mark Twain. Aquarium"". Wax figures shock me with their resemblance to the original, excessive dead naturalness, and therefore an eerie picture was imprinted in my imagination: in a dim room, a gray-haired old wax man in a white suit sits in a wooden rocking chair. But then the chair begins to sway, something clicks inside the old man (oh my God!) And smoke comes out of his mouth, and then a mechanical voice says rude sailor jokes. The inscription under all this: "Mark Twain".

I look at mansions with huge mirrored windows on the way. Maybe those who participated in the mind-blowing action, during which all the books of Mark Twain were read aloud, live here. They read day and night, fainted: Needless to say - a record! .. Among all these inventions, I especially liked one: in the state of Connecticut, in a park, they built a long fence, and everyone could whitewash it, like Tom Sawyer. Our former official writers', and especially Gorky's, anniversaries - with the bosses' presidium and official speeches in large halls - to America, painting the fence in honor of its beloved author and hero, would probably also seem fantastic.

The fence as part of the celebrations did not arise by chance. Talking with Americans, I have often seen in them a constant desire to start or support the game, whether it is the development of some important project or the holding of a scientific conference, and, of course, at a party and when visiting an exhibition or museum.

For our museum, playing in combination with smart material is not very good yet, but there is a need for lightness. As for reading in the museum - we did it! Choosing certain pages, a person finds something close to himself, speaks about himself through the writer, through his images and words, defines something for himself and in himself - what could be more appropriate for a literary museum? However, our reading is not to the point of fainting, but as part of a long-standing Russian family tradition of reading at the table, when reading is interrupted, something is repeated, pondered, when everyone together experiences one thing: the writer's word.

""Merka - 2!""

""Mark Twain!"" - so shouted the young pilot Samuel Langhorn Clemens, leading the ship along the Mississippi. It meant: "Merka - 2!", and if so, then it is deep enough here, and the ship will not bury its nose in the bottom of the river. He was hardy, energetic and funny, this Sam Clemens, and had already seen something in life: he left school due to the early death of his father, a judge in the town of Hannibal, earned a piece of bread as an apprentice typesetter in newspapers, where he tried himself in literature .

He tried to catch his luck in the silver mines of Nevada and in the gold mines in California; working as a reporter, catching a clever word and salty jokes, what is known as "" wild humor "". He signed his laconic humoresques with the familiar pilot's exclamation, saturated with the fresh smell of the river wind, which we in Russia know as a cheerful name - Mark Twain.

In 1867, Mark Twain traveled to Europe and Palestine on the steamer Quaker City. From France, Greece, Italy, Turkey, the Crimea, his reports went to America, which a year later were published as a separate book "Simples Abroad". Criticism was noisy in delight from folklore humor, from the fact that in every word there was pride in New World, so different from Europe with its ""obscurantism"".

It was after this trip, during the period of success of his first book, that Mark Twain met the daughter of a wealthy coal merchant, Olivia Langton, and managed to win her hand, despite his modest income. In 1870, the marriage was concluded, and the Clemens moved to Hartford, where, while no one had prepared their own housing for them, everything had to be done by themselves, relying on their own strength and, of course, on a non-poor dowry.

Steamboat, fortress or cuckoo clock?

Such a place of residence as Mark Twain's house - "" part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock "" cannot but interest the reader. In such a dwelling, even in the most gray, without flights, bold fantasies can be born. What can we say about the famous host:

Deborah, a museum researcher, introduces me to the house. Calm and confident manner of speaking, clothes - like most of our Russian colleagues. From her story, from guidebooks, I learn that Mark Twain in 1873 bought a piece of land on the eastern outskirts of Hartford, which was considered a quiet, secluded place. Edward Potter, an architect from New York, was hired to design the house. Mrs. Clemens, the hostess of the future house, drew the layout of the rooms with her own hand and drew attention to what kind of view should be from the windows of each room.

Most of the construction was completed in 1874, and the Clemens moved into their new home in September of that year, inspired by hopes of happiness and prosperity. However, it turned out to be difficult to maintain the house: the expenses clearly exceeded the financial capabilities of the family. There was nothing to continue the improvement of the house: several rooms were left without wallpaper and furnishings. Royalties from the books "The Hardened" (1872), "The Gilded Age" (1873), from the collection "Old and New Essays" (1875) were invested in the house.

Everything changed after the success of Mark Twain's first independent novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which brought him worldwide fame. Numerous tours with lectures, book readings corrected the situation with the house: the wing where the kitchen was located was enlarged, the main rooms were completely redone by the well-known interior design firm "Association of Artists", in which Louis Tiffany worked (yes, the same one, stained glass windows and lamps which are so fashionable now!), Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, Samuel Colman.

Working with the order, Edward Potter, a talented architect, musician and writer, tried to discover the decorative possibilities of brick, changing the direction, angle, projection of the masonry; decorated the surface of the wall with black and bright red ornaments.

The rooms that were in the ledges of the house were built up to the turrets and turned into wonderful open verandas from where you can admire the surrounding beauties.

The wooden elements of the house are worked out in the most careful way, which is quite consistent with the “block (wooden) style” of the 1870s. The use of natural colors (cobalt, umber) in the decoration of doors and verandas, ornaments with butterflies and lilies on the gates and gates, the use of many plants for interior decoration - all this created a stunning image of the writer's house. I'm walking around the house. In the dark hallway, Deborah talks about the restoration of the house, which became a museum in 1974 - I notice that the Gorky Museum-Apartment is only three years older. She marks with a spotlight on the ceiling those places that have been preserved since the time of Mark Twain. Silver painting, red walls with a dark blue pattern reminiscent of Native American textile designs (perhaps created by Tiffany). Fireplace decorated with carved wooden details, made in India, and inserts of reddish marble with copper overlays, made according to the idea of ​​Mark Twain, makes a strong impression with its unusualness and luxury.

Elegant copper and enamel lighting fixtures, English tiled tiles, silver embellishments in the guest room, diffused overhead light in the bathroom providing excellent lighting and a sense of privacy, orange and pink walls with silver painting in the living room, all add to the magnificence of the home. I look at the huge mirror in the living room: it turns out to be a wedding present from the Clemens. It was originally in a pink and gold frame with a porcelain lion's head at the top, but after alterations in 1881, the frame was repainted: it did not harmonize with the new furnishings.

The dining room, which at first had low-key walls, has since 1881 been covered with rich red and gold paper with a raised lily-shaped pattern. The walnut wood doors are covered with exquisite Chinese-style fine patterns. The dining room fireplace (author's work by Tiffany) is decorated with expensive ceramic tiles and polished copper plates in a modest wooden frame.

Mark Twain seemed to be enjoying his home: "How ugly and tasteless the interiors I have seen in Europe, compared to the excellent style of this lower floor, with its delightful color harmony, its permeating spirit of peace, serenity and deep contentment." "," he wrote in 1892.

Looking into the bedroom... This fundamental thing must be seen! The writer purchased the bed in Venice in 1878 as a sixteenth-century antique and regarded it as the most comfortable bed he had ever owned. True, his little daughters were addicted to unscrewing the wooden angels from the headboard and playing with dolls, but when the angels returned to their place, it seemed that they cast a pleasant slumber. Fantastically intricate headboard with flowers, fruits and cupids. Twain paid big money for the bed. He loved to read, work in it and always lay down with his head - "" at his feet "": - I must see what such money was paid for!

Deborah, our colleague, to whom I have a kindred professional feeling, slyly remarks that Mark Twain's bed was not an antique, it is just an elaborate forgery: the writer was cleverly swindled, but he never found out about it.

Yes, Twain loved money, strove for wealth - and at the same time he laughed evilly at himself for it. I wander through his rooms and think that he, enjoying the house, at times probably languished in this luxury, in the splendor of artistic interiors. How else to explain that it was here that those of his books appeared, which the world called the romantic epic of the Mississippi River? In this house, he survived his "Boldino" time, creating seven of the best books. In each of them, the heroes are whirlwind, free and not burdened with money. Wealth for a writer is not only necessary, but also a lot of superfluous: it is not the main thing for creative person! However, not too much:

Children are well thought out and comfortable. The wallpapers in them were created by the English artist Walter Crane and are illustrations of a fairy tale about the adventures of a frog, the fireplace is decorated with a fabulous bas-relief "Rooster's Funeral of the Rooster".

The classroom was originally planned as a writer's study, but was given to the children and their governesses. The shape of the window openings was made according to the idea of ​​Mark Twain, who saw something similar in one of the monasteries during his trip to Europe. Wall and ceiling decorations were made in Elmira, in 1879, by decorator Frederic Schwep. Another detail from Mark Twain in decorating the interior: Native American palm fans over the piano. They were bought by a writer for children and used by them in home theatrical performances.

Mark Twain settled in the house at the age of thirty, full of energy and ideas. The house he built absorbed not only his writing fees, but also his artistic aspirations, impressions of the world, memories. The Artists Association, which eventually became the leader of the American Renaissance in the decorative arts, was its marvelous partner in the construction of this special, individual world. The artists of the "Association", interior designers, did not accept traditional European styles, they boldly introduced glass, metallic paints, metal into their work, used motifs hidden in nature, a sophisticated harmonic range of colors. They found each other: the writer and these new artists.

Tom Sawyer was born here

In his marvelous house, Mark Twain and his family lived for two decades. In his letters there are thoughts that seem to be projected onto the rooms through which I am now passing. "" Marriage - yes, this is the highest happiness in life: But it is also the greatest tragedy of life. And the deeper the love, the deeper the tragedy." ""I'm grateful, grateful, inexpressibly grateful for the love you've already given me. I am crowned, enthroned, anointed king. I am surrounded by kings" - so writes Samuel Clemens to his dear wife Olivia. She later gave him three children. The only son died, having lived to the age of three, and his father blamed himself primarily for his death. Didn't see it! Brought out for a walk, without really wrapping: Colds, illness, death. Having buried his son, he, outliving the pain, making up for the loss, subconsciously turning to creativity as a medicine, began to write about his childhood, about the boys. So in this house on the pages of manuscripts since then settled and began to test the patience of Aunt Polly Tom, who knew that when his name is pronounced in full - Thomas Sawyer, this surely portends some kind of trouble.

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", which glorified the author, were favorably received by strict professional American critics, who saw in Tom Sawyer a young businessman with his dreams of getting rich, with the ability to benefit from everyday situations - the national type of a business American. But let's not forget that the author invested himself in the protagonist - the underminer of prohibitions and traditions, and the poeticization of the child's attitude to the world, good humor made the book special for contemporaries and many subsequent generations. "A story for boys must be written in such a way that it can interest any adult man who has ever been a boy," said the writer. He considered his "Tom Sawyer" "" a hymn to childhood, transcribed in prose "". Or maybe it's a touching lyrical poem in prose?

"" Before disappearing, the girl threw a flower over the fence - pansies. Tom ran to the fence and stopped two paces from the flower, then covered his eyes with his hand and began to peer into the distance, as if he saw something interesting at the end of the street. Then he picked up a straw from the ground and began to set it on his nose, throwing his head back: moving closer and closer, he approached the flower and finally stepped on it with his bare foot - flexible fingers grabbed the flower, and, jumping on one leg, Tom disappeared behind angle, but only for a moment, while he put the flower under his jacket, closer to his heart - or maybe to his stomach: he was not very strong in anatomy and did not understand such things.

"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was written for ten years and was like a continuation of "Tom Sawyer", but Huck saw life in a different way: tougher, more contrast. The book was considered dangerous, worthless, accused of insulting the Negro population (?!), banned. The ban on it still exists in a number of US states. So the writer did not please his compatriots as a young tramp fighting for the freedom of his black adult friend.

The story "The Prince and the Pauper" (1882) about the conditionality of social status appeared in the Hartford house, the novel "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur" (1889) is a very mysterious thing: on the one hand, a parody of a chivalric romance, from which went into literature the reception of time travel; on the other - a consequence, as they say, of some mysterious incident with the writer himself, connected with his personal experience""movements"" in time: And if it's true that information does not disappear in the world without a trace, then Mark Twain's house may contain something very special:

You have to go up the wooden stairs to the billiard room, isolated from daily worries and housework, to find yourself where Mark Twain worked. There was no fuss and screams of children here, and the room gradually began to turn into the master's study. Here he is - you can't say a simpleton, "a simpleton", but in fact the great maestro of the word, ridiculous boasting, destroying definitions, wrote in the old days about the special lot of the New World, alien to the contradictions of old Europe. Later - from the story ""Coot Wilson"" (1894), about a sage who was ridiculed - Mark Twain becomes disillusioned with bourgeois democracy (""majority is always wrong""), rejects American patriotism (""The commercial spirit replaced morality, each became a patriot of his pocket ""). He admired the Russian revolutionaries, welcomed the rebellious writer Gorky who came to America, wrote his favorite book about Joan of Arc, published impudent political pamphlets against the American imperialist policy, against the Russian Tsar.

The ceiling of the billiard room is decorated with paintings with pipes, cigars, billiard cues, as well as on the translucent panels of the south side, where there is a date of construction of the house. From the room - access to the veranda. Now the doors are open: the house is pouring into the multicolor of autumn. The sharp November air invigorates and encourages action. I'm trying to take a picture of the writer's office. Deborah condemningly warns: no. I somehow mechanically click on the go (the photo turned out to be called ""unexpected angle"": with a wastebasket). Then in the museum shop I understand why photography is prohibited: photographs - a significant part of the income - go for 3-4 dollars. Even the museum's website does not have photographs of the exposition (this is the museum's product); site offers general information, a story about the restoration, advertises sponsors, reports museum news.

: On a piece of paper, the writer's hand sketched: "Oh, this human race. Often one has to regret that Noah and his team were not late for the ship "". And next - a witty taunt: "" I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter saying that I approve of them.

This billiard room with a desk, these orange and red-and-gold walls of the house witnessed the unexpected collapse of Mark Twain, which ended his twenty-year stay in Hartford, marked by literary success and family comfort. Finally ruined his own publishing company, he was bogged down in debt. To get out of the situation, he resorts to a tried and tested trick: he goes to performances in trip around the world. Exhausted at lectures in Australia, India, Africa, he returns home to a terrible blow: his beloved daughter Suzy dies.

After a while, his wife Olivia dies, then suddenly his second daughter Jean. The lyrical hero of the grief-stricken late Mark Twain becomes Satan (the story "The Mysterious Stranger"). This thing is not for making money, here "everything without looking back" is about people, their seductions, weaknesses. The story was not published during his lifetime. But he considered it his main book.

AT modern world there are no descendants of Mark Twain (involuntarily you begin to speculate: for what?), and in the neighborhood there was and still is another writer's dwelling - the house of Harriet Beecher Stowe, supported by her huge family clan.

Neighbor and 13 cats

The city of Hartford is a multi-stage structure: its streets are located at different levels. Today, just like under Mark Twain, it is the abode, the nest of big capital, the insurance business. The quarter where the Clemens lived was clearly prestigious: ""Each house was in the center of a green area about an acre in size." Fences were not accepted here. The closest neighbor of Mark Twain, by the will of fate, was the writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, who created one single book - Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was reprinted many times in Russia. True, she had another book, but this is a manual for housewives, which is a special genre that is not included in the "high" fiction. Now there is also a museum in her house, which is maintained by descendants, relatives - there are more than one hundred and forty of them. As I understand it, this is a kind of actively working feminist center.

Due to the lack of fences, I was never able to figure out where the land of the Clemens family ends, and where the neighbor's possessions begin. Both houses are firmly planted in a well-groomed green lawn with groups of shrubs and trees. In these places, the "fence" story would not have happened due to the lack of an object: "Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of lime and a long brush in his hands. He looked around the fence, and all joy flew away from him, and the spirit plunged into the deepest anguish. Thirty yards of a nine-foot-high wooden fence! Life seemed to him empty, and existence - a heavy burden.

Mark Twain once visited Harriet Beecher Stowe. When he returned home, his wife was horrified: “How? You were without a collar and a tie?!"" He put the collar and tie in a package and sent it to Beecher Stowe with an accompanying note: ""Please accept the additional parts of my person that came to visit you"". He apparently hoped for the understanding and humor of his colleague, whom he apparently appreciated for her knowledge in the field of home economics. In any case, it is worth noting that a greenhouse appeared in his house in 1896, although according to the sketches of Ch. Hasam, but in full accordance with the recommendations of the writer-neighbor.

We return to the house of Mark Twain already familiar to us and inspect the greenhouse. Next to the sliding door was a statue of Eve by K. Gerhard, whose studies abroad were paid for by the writer.

It's time to pay attention to the flowers and palm trees of the memorial museum: it turns out that they are the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of those historical ones, who were looked after by the writer's wife and daughters. In order to populate the house-museum with its native flora, our American colleagues took cuttings and sprouts of indoor plants from the descendants of the doctor who treated the Clemens family, who, in turn, took sprouts in Mark Twain's house.

We move further along the wooden floorboards, slightly creaking. O! Mother-in-law's room! Indeed, there is something to talk about at these doors: she did not immediately decide to marry her daughter to a smoking, drinking, rude, but such a pretty (!) Young writer, but over the years they became real friends. It is likely, to the chagrin of many Americans, in other respects, who else but him - with his own language - could say such a thing about his mother-in-law! But Clemens and his mother-in-law, for the most part, coexisted quite peacefully. And this is something familiar: One of the beds is covered with a patchwork quilt - well, dear "Kashirin's House"!

Deborah says that the servants' room has not yet been restored, but this work is in the plan of the museum. We are talking about the possibility of displaying toilets in the memorial museum. The Hemingway Museum in Cuba shows a writer's toilet, which has a bookcase and shelves with favorite books. We and the Mark Twain Museum refrain from showing these secluded places, although I remember how Pushkin said there that everyone is interested in seeing a writer:

There is no such museum where a caustic visitor would not ask again: "Is this genuine?" Here, a third of the exposition is originals, including an old telephone, which for this reason is worth looking at closely. Clemens, an entrepreneur, once ventured to invest in a new business - in a telephone company, although there was no complete certainty of success, yet this telephone - the first in Hartford, was installed by him.

Everything is reliable in the house-museum, but, thank God! - no smell: the Clemens family had four dogs and thirteen cats: On the mantelpiece is a ceremonial portrait of a cat in a ruffled collar: he is the hero of many fairy tales and stories composed by the owner of the house for his own and other people's children.

"" Aunt's yellow cat entered the room, purring and looking greedily at the spoon, as if asking for a taste. Tom opened his mouth and poured a spoonful of medicine into it. Peter jumped two meters into the air, let out a wild scream, and darted around the room, bumping into furniture, overturning flower pots, and making an unimaginable noise. Then he stood up on his hind legs and danced around the room in wild merriment, bowing his head to his shoulder and howling with indomitable joy. Then he rushed around the house, sowing chaos and destruction in his path. No, these lines would not have appeared in Mark Twain if it were not for constant communication with the cat family in their own home.

Now it doesn't seem strange to me that the Mark Twain Research Center celebrated his anniversary with a cat festival: ""in honor of the greatest catlover in the history of American literature"".

Mr. Boer, director, and others

We met with the director of the museum, Mr. John Boer, in the hall of the former carriage house. Now it is a service room, an assembly hall, which is sometimes rented out for profit. On the tobacco-colored wallpaper, I find handwritten lines, not without meaning and play, a few aphorisms of Mark Twain: "Honesty was once the best policy", ""The root of evil is in the absence of money"". Next to the director is David Clark, chairman of the museum's board of trustees. This tandem is quite in the spirit of what you read on the wall: "Wealth is the best defender of your principles." What is a board of trustees? These are wealthy people who, for the benefit of society, without receiving any profit from it, invest their money, earn money for the museum's programs. They spend on the museum and something priceless - their abilities, energy, time. Mr. Clarke, speaking about museum everyday life, "taunts" me with the fact that in their museum tickets for foreigners are no more expensive than for Americans, let alone in Russia. What is, is: we always remember that foreigners do not deduct taxes "on the museum" to us - so they pay in cash at the museum cash desk.

The director of the American Museum is hired by the board of trustees. In the circle of his concerns - the restoration, preservation of the house-museum, which is registered as a national historical site and now has two major awards National Council for the preservation of historical values. How else? The Mark Twain House is a cultural monument, a literary and memorial landmark - and also restored as an architectural monument, it is an example of the Victorian style of America, it is also the embodiment of the innovative design of outstanding American architects and artists. The awards to the museum are for the return to the historical house of its appearance, which reflected the personality traits and lifestyle of the eminent writer.

John Boer temperamentally sorts out the museum's budget. Now it is more than one and a half million dollars. State? State? No, if something comes from the state, it is very little. The budget consists of the money of the trustees, members of the museum council, eight percent brings inviolable capital, then - entrance tickets and the museum shop. Inviolable capital is money left to the museum by will, or other capital that the museum does not touch, but only uses the percentage of its deposit in the bank. At the Mark Twain Museum, entrance tickets are 10-15 dollars (I also met those where 30-40 dollars is the Children's Museum in Boston, and the system of free admission, and "pay what you can" - this is the Metropolitan).

When John gets hooked on the story, it becomes obvious, though it sounds corny, that he is a grown-up Tom Sawyer. And he paints his fence in such a way that others want to do it with him. He is an architect by education, he is proud that in his family higher education received first.

He is laid back and benevolent. A white shirt and elegant suspenders during a business meeting make the reception half official. More friendly. John temperamentally asserts: “Mark Twain made himself! He was successful and failed, he admired capitalism as a system, believed in this system and laughed at it. But, undoubtedly, the spirit of entrepreneurship was close to him, and this should live and lives in the museum. What is the mission of the museum? It is to assert the value of the legacy of Mark Twain as one of the outstanding national writers, as a figure who embodies the culture of the country. Why is a museum needed at all? So that a person can get to know himself better, learn something new about himself. At the Mark Twain Museum, the American perceives himself as an American. It is certain. The museum is important for society as a carrier of the traditional, established, best in culture. We've been crippled by mass culture. In America, many people know baseball players, but they will not answer the question of who John F. Kennedy is, and not just Mark Twain.

I was hardly moved by what colleague John said about educational programs- in our museums this is a traditional type of work, however, requiring constant adjustments. Some museum people in America, speaking about their work, notice that their motto today is: "" Art belongs to the people "". Yes! To whom these words belong, they are well aware, but, based on the experience of Russia, they prefer not to mention Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. When from time to time we ask ourselves the question of what we can focus on in the practice of US museums, the answer, in my opinion, is somewhat paradoxical: of course, on the ability to successfully do our job in market conditions, including our previous Russian experience which they have successfully introduced into their lives, really making museums accessible to people, important for the life of local communities, a link in communication between different generations. My attention is switched on when Mr. Bauer talks about the museum's work with young people who have ended up in prisons. They have created a special program for incarcerated teenagers and work with them seriously, informally.

I am surprised to learn that there is no Complete Works of Mark Twain and, apparently, there will not be one in the coming years. Market! Money! True, the thirty-volume edition is coming to an end, which is very gratifying.

The museum releases something itself. The book about the restoration of the house seems to me valuable, and the periodical magazine of the museum "Mark Twain - News" is very curious. All this can be purchased at the museum store, which sells only what is directly related to the theme of the museum: the writer’s books, his photographs, household items of the Victorian era, or rather, their likeness (for example, a chintz desktop pillow with cinnamon - a stand for a hot cup of tea , postcards, stationery, etc.). The store is located in a separate room: souvenirs are available as in all self-service stores, there is a cash register.

The director of the museum says that architects and designers regularly come to Hartford for conferences in the spring, but autumn belongs to writers and literary critics. Recently, the problem of "Censorship in the USA" was put forward for discussion. After all, "Huckleberry Finn" is listed in banned books in many states of America. And that was during the life of the writer. "Great, this will help sell an additional 25,000 books," Mark Twain once exclaimed with optimism. For the Russian reader, the ban on this book looks strange. I remember Hemingway's assessment, who believed that all modern American literature came out of this book by Mark Twain. But once the Victorians did not approve of the bad manners of the hero, and then, during the struggle for civil rights, dark-skinned people began to be offended by the word "Negro" "in the book. Now it is perceived in the States as offensive, and everyday situations quickly taught me not to pronounce it even in Russian speech - it’s better to say “African American”, although for us “Negro” is quite neutral.

Mr. Boer is young and ardent: he proposed to put the topic for discussion: "Negro: the power of the word" ", but such battles began that they had to limit themselves to talking about censorship.

Prominent journalists and writers, among them the famous playwright Arthur Miller, took and continue to take part in the affairs of the museum. Everything shows that the museum, its activities are supported by the creative intelligentsia, who are aware that Mark Twain is not only the past, but also the present in contemporary culture America, world.

"The Gorky Incident"

Word by word, we go on the topic of the relationship between Gorky and Mark Twain. I take advantage of the situation and present Mr. Boer with a copy of Gorky's autograph on that book by Twain, which Alexei Maksimovich once recommended to his growing son. On the eve of my departure for the USA, Gorky's granddaughter M.M. Peshkova donated the book to our museum, and now it is in the children's museum-apartment of the writer.

Gorky appreciated a lot of things in Mark Twain, but especially "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn", wrote that it was "" wonderful books"", ""brilliantly reflecting the romance of a child's heart"". The episodes of the contact between the biographies of writers are known mainly to specialists, and they add up to a story that leads to reflections on different plans: about America, its foundations, about Russia, about Gorky's emergence on the world stage, about his complex attitude towards America and Americans, etc.

The writers' meeting took place in 1906. For Gorky, then a trip to the United States solved both social problems (raising money "for a revolution"), and security problems (in Russia, he was threatened with arrest), and personal problems. After seven years of marriage with his wife E.P. Peshkova, he broke up with her, although there was no official divorce and a complete break in relations, and connected his life with M.F. Andreeva. She, selflessly devoted to him, leaving the theater for him, agreed to follow him abroad. It was wonderful: she spoke several foreign languages, he - none.

They secretly crossed the Finnish border, arrived in Berlin, where Gorky performed to the enthusiastic cries of "Hoch!", managed to replenish the Bolshevik cashier; then - Paris, where the writer told France that he was "offended by the love of the bourgeois."

The United States was ahead. In April 1906, he and M.F. Andreeva boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm ocean steamer in Cherbourg, which delivered him to the shores of the New World. The Russian ambassador in Washington advised the administration to apply to the rebel a law banning anarchists from entering the country. However, upon arrival, the writer said that he respects law and order and is in opposition to the Russian government, which now represents organized anarchy, while he himself is not an anarchist.

During the first interviews and speeches, M.F. Andreeva was his translator, as well as later.

Gorky was expected in New York: his works had already been translated into English and published in Great Britain and the USA. Sympathizing with the mission of the Russian writer, Mark Twain joined the Gorky Relief Committee and spoke at a dinner in honor of the Russian guest.

Twain and Gorky were the center of attention at a crowded meeting, they talked animatedly, and enjoyed the conversation. Mark Twain literally “captured” Gorky, and he looked at him “with enthusiastic eyes shining from under thick eyebrows” (N.E. Burenin). Answering Mark Twain at dinner, Gorky said: “The day on which I was honored to meet Mark Twain is a happy day for me. Mark Twain is known all over the world, but in Russia he is known more than all American writers: He is a man of strength - one of those who strikes very hard blows ... "" (a fatal observation, as it turned out).

An interview with Gorky appeared in the Telegram newspaper, in which he admitted that Mark Twain was his favorite writer in the United States: "I read him at that time in my life when I was beaten for reading." He said that beatings "compared to the pleasure I got from his fine books" "seemed to be a punishment" "quite light"".

A warm welcome, attention, success suddenly (the information came from the Russian embassy: the Russian government did not give up) exploded in a scandal due to the fact that Gorky and M.F. Andreeva were in a civil marriage. Gorky came to a country of a freedom-loving past, but also to a country of strict Puritan customs, which he was immediately and sharply reminded of.

Many Americans turned their backs on him. Mark Twain also retreated from his Russian colleague in writing: he left the committee, did not answer calls. He explained to reporters: “When Gorky arrived in our country, it seemed to us that he would be that huge force that would captivate the Americans: the Russian people always treated his actions as unconditionally correct. However, each country has its own rules of conduct: And when someone comes from abroad, he must respect them ... ""

Apparently, still feeling the awkwardness of the situation, Mark Twain took up the article "The Gorky Incident", where he tried to explain in more detail, but did not finish the article, did not publish it (it was published only in 1944, when both writers had already passed away) . In it we read that breaking a custom is "much worse than breaking a law, because the law is sand, and custom is a rock, an alloy of copper, granite, boiling iron"". "" A man is obliged to appear in public in a tailcoat, "" Mark Twain noted, but he understood that his retreat from Gorky in a difficult situation would not be understood unequivocally by everyone.

Gorky in one of the newspapers, wishing to protect Mark Twain from attacks, wrote: "" You should not: attack the venerable Mark Twain. This is an excellent man, but - he is old, and old people very often do not clearly understand the meaning of facts ... ""

Recalling the history of communication between writers, we agreed that this topic could be of interest for a new traveling exhibition, which is being prepared by the Mark Twain Museum. I take note of the productive exhibition idea of ​​my American colleagues: the exhibition travels to different countries, museums, and each "host country" undertakes to supplement it with a new stand "Mark Twain and:" exposing its material. "" Mark Twain and Gorky "" - according to the agreement, the topic left for us. It is exciting to work on this topic in our museum: both Mark Twain and Gorky obtained "raw materials" for their books at the cost of own life, in life's trials, the study of which is important for many as a support in their own lives.

Their oak and our plane maple

During conversations in the museum, no, no, and yes, I mentally returned to what I went to this house with, what Russian publications of past years set me up for. With my own eyes I see a different picture: the Mark Twain Museum is going to build a literary exposition. It turns out that that year, "branded" as "America without Mark Twain", was the time of the creation of the anniversary American exhibition "Mark Twain", which was created by very serious partners: the Marktwain Scientific Society, the Smithsonian Institution. The exhibition traveled around America for five years and was presented at the 1996 Olympics. There is a hope that we will see it too, about which the coordinator of the project to show it in Russia, the energetic and enterprising Elaine Ullman, is busy. and our colleagues, the Mark Twain Museum, whom we support.

I did not manage to find traces of a sawn oak near the writer's house in Hartford, which I wrote about at the very beginning, but thinking about it, I would not agree with our "" "anniversary press"", which saw in a fallen tree "" crucifixion "" of memory of great writer. It is worth remembering here how it is with Mark Twain: "" If you do not like the weather, wait a few minutes "". They waited, and in their own practice, they had to part with giant trees when, having rotted, they became a dangerous threat to the museum building. Last time we experienced the loss of an old tree on the museum grounds in the summer of 2004. A huge plane-shaped maple eighteen meters high with a crown of twenty-five meters is rooted in the foundation of Kashirin's House. Huge branches fell off, a void was found in the trunk. We were faced with a choice: to keep the memorial house - a monument of history and culture of federal significance, or maple - a natural monument regional significance. The fight between "the best and the good". We chose a house.

Much the same was true in Hartford. The fallen oak is indeed a sign, but I read it today, based on the realities of international museum practice, as a symbol of the concern of American intellectuals for their cultural heritage.

Hartford - Nizhny Novgorod

Mark Twain. Aphorisms and jokes

Collected by Konstantin Dushenko

I do not intend to spoil relations with either heaven or hell - I have friends in both areas.

Mark Twain

MULTIPLE DATES

1835, November 30. In the village of Florida, Missouri, Samuel Clemens, the future writer Mark Twain, was born. “There were a hundred people in Florida at that time, and I increased the population by exactly one percent. Not every historical figure can boast that he has done more for his hometown.”

1839. The Clemens move to the town of Hannibal.

1850. Samuel's first literary experiences in the local newspaper, which was published by his brother Orion.

1853 – 1861. Samuel Clemens travels the country, working as a pilot on the Mississippi. “I am one of those who at any moment would give up literature to take the helm again.”

1862. Twain is a prospector in Nevada. "I used to work in the gold mines and I know everything about gold mining, except for one thing: how to make money there."

1863. First correspondence signed "Mark Twain".

1867. Arrival in New York. Twain's first collection of short stories, The Famous Jumping Frog.

1869. Twain's book "Simps Abroad" is a huge success.

1870. Marriage to Olivia Langdon. “I am so happy that I cannot remember without pain the senselessly lost thirty years of my life. If I had to go through life all over again, I would marry right away, without waiting until my teeth erupt or when I learn how to beat dishes.

1871. Twain moves to Hartford, Connecticut.

1876. "Adventures of Tom Sawyer".

1882. "Prince and the Pauper".

1885. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".

1889. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court".

1895 – 1896. Traveling around the world with public readings - to pay off debts.

1907. Twain is an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. “I came into the world with Halley's comet. I would like to stay until her return and leave the mortal world with her.

April 24, 1910 Death of Mark Twain. In the sky, as at his birth, Halley's comet shone again.

MARK TWAIN ABOUT HIMSELF

I was born without teeth, and here Richard III has an advantage over me. But I was born without a hump, and here the advantage is on my side. My parents were poor - in moderation, and honest - also in moderation.

As far as I understand, it is desirable for you to get information from me about how I lied for the first time in my life and how I got out of this lie. I was born in 1835; I am now many years old and my memory is not the same as before. It would be better if you asked how and when I first told the truth, it would be much easier for me to answer this, since I remember these circumstances quite clearly. My family claims that this happened the week before last, but this is simply flattery on their part.

One of Mark Twain's afternoon speeches:

When I was a boy, I went to a school where birch twigs were not uncommon. Writing on a desk was strictly forbidden, under the threat of a five-dollar fine or a public flogging - one's choice. Once I broke this law. My father decided that public flogging was too hard for me, and gave me five dollars. In those days, five dollars was a considerable sum, while whipping had no special consequences; this is how... - here Twain shook off the ashes from his cigar and continued, - ... this is how I earned my first five dollars.

My literary destiny is very curious. I have never been able to lie without being believed; when I spoke the truth, no one wanted to believe me.

I have never kept a promise I made in my life. It is very likely that under the body that gives me the ability promise, the place was allotted with such generosity that it was not enough for the body that would give me the ability fulfill promises. But I'm not angry. I don't tolerate half-heartedness in anything. I prefer one highly developed ability to two common ones.

I am a dork from backwater Missouri who, over the years, has become a Connecticut Yankee. Missouri morality and Connecticut culture have merged in me. In my opinion, gentlemen, this is the perfect combination.

About the years when money was tight:

Need breeds courage. I have no doubt that if at that time I had been offered to translate the Talmud from Hebrew, I would have taken it - and at the same time I would have tried to introduce as much fiction as possible into it for the same money.

I could be a soldier if I wanted to. I have already mastered part of the military trade: I know more about retreat than the man who invented retreat.

I was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor. However, few people managed to avoid this difference.

I have seldom been able to notice a good opportunity before it ceased to be one.

I have never exercised in my life except for sleeping and lying on the couch.

I'm no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that's simply because forty years ago I used up my limit. Everything has a limit!

At the age of 72:

At two in the morning I feel like an old man like everyone else. At this time, life in a person is barely glimmering. At this hour, I am extremely sinful. Youth and courage return to six o'clock in the morning.

My books are water; books of great geniuses - wine. Everyone drinks water.

ABOUT ADAM AND EVE

Adam and Eve had many advantages over us, but they were most fortunate in that they avoided teething.

It must have been difficult for Adam and Eve to have a conversation: they had no one to gossip about.

If the snake was forbidden, Adam would have eaten it too.

Good for Adam! If he had a good joke, he could be sure he wasn't repeating old jokes.

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He took away from us the “blessing” of idleness and brought us the “curse” of work.

Now I see that I was mistaken about Eve: it is better to live outside of paradise with her than without her - in paradise.

ABOUT AMERICA

About California during the Gold Rush:

Anxious crowds of people scurried through the streets, work was in full swing everywhere, laughter, music, curses were heard, people danced, quarreled, shot and cut each other, every evening for breakfast the newspapers served their readers a fresh corpse - murder and interrogation - in a word, everything was here that beautifies life.

Satan, turning to the stranger, irritably: “You Chicagoans imagine that you are the best here; but in fact, there are simply more of you here.

The most beautiful women we have met in France were born and raised in America.

Although we are skeptical Democrats, we choke with happiness when the duke notices us; and when the monarch notices us, we suffer a softening of the brain until the end of our days. We do our best to keep silent about these priceless meetings, and sometimes some of us manage to keep our dukes and monarchs to ourselves; it costs us a lot of work, but sometimes we succeed.

Exactly a century and a quarter has passed since the time when the former pilot of the Mississippi River Shipping Company Samuel Clemens, who took a pseudonym for himself from a specific ship crew (“mark twain!” Means “mark double!”, That is, the double depth of throwing the lot into the fairway ), launched his heroes, a teenager named Huckleberry Finn and runaway Negro Jim, on their way to main river North America. Towards freedom and the foggy shore of the American dream. What happens if you try to drive this route today?

Of course, an attempt to literally "walk in the footsteps" of two friends is obviously hopeless. And the point here is not only that, for lack of a vessel on which Huckleberry Finn and Negro Jim sailed a hundred and sixty years ago (in those politically incorrect times, the concept of “African American” did not exist yet), we get into the car. After all, both that old raft and that heroic route are surreal.

True, in other places of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain calculates the distances covered by travelers per night, calculates the speed of the current, etc. However, even here the writer's fantasy triumphs over reality. If on the first segment the duration of the path still somehow fits into the framework of the possible and reasonable, then a failure occurs and time either rapidly accelerates its run, or begins to stagnate, and all calculations go down the drain.

Equally futile are attempts to combine the fictitious, defiantly similar Pokeville, Bricksville and Pikesville with the authentic towns of the American South, clinging to the banks of the River - Mark Twain does not always call her by name.

However, if you carefully study the biography of the writer, then there are points of contact between literature and life. Take at least the homeland of the Twain boys, St. Petersburg, in which all researchers are ready to see

Hannibal. Trademark "Huck Finn"

It was not Mark Twain at that time in Hannibal, but simply Sam Clemens found himself with his parents at the age of four, lived for some time and since then almost never returned to childhood and early youth. Nevertheless, there is a strong feeling that the town, which seems to have not changed too much over the past one hundred and seventy years, as if remaining faithful to the illustrious countryman, is only looking for a reason to pay him off. Mark Twain is not just an honorary citizen of the city of Hannibal, Missouri, although such a diploma does not exist, not just his memory that does not fade over the years, he is his air.

Sometimes this unashamed love finds naive forms. There are two hotels in Hannibal, one is called "Clemens", the other - "Mark Twain". Sometimes the forms are monumental and pompous.

The bronze Mark Twain dominates the town - from the top of the hill he looks over the river distance, which he himself immortalized in his various writings. Alas, official solemnity suppresses, does not allow the hero’s soul to express itself, as it has dissipated in his books and imprinted in the minds of millions of readers of different generations and different countries. This Mark Twain reminds me of Gogol, to whom the Soviet government erected a monument on the boulevard named after him, pushing Andreev's wonderful work out of there.

However, everything else in Hannibal is alive, I would even say, my own Mark Twain, or, if you like, Sam Clemens.

From the wall of the house, in which a completely ordinary eatery was set up, a green frog stares funny, that very “famous galloping frog from Calaveras” from the story of the same name, the appearance of which marked the final transformation of the pilot, and then the newspaperman Clemens into a writer. Naturally, the name of the cafe is "Jumping Frog". You walk by, and it seems that the old joke is about to be played out in the faces: the champion frog, nicknamed Daniel Webster, is stuffed in his belly with shot, and he shamefully loses the race (jump?) to some miserable frog from a nearby swamp.

Nearby is the Becky Thatcher restaurant.

On the next street is the Mark Twain bar.

And even a shopping center (although not in Hannibal itself, but about ten miles away, in a place with the sonorous name of Palmyra) is called Huck Finn, although it is difficult to see anything in common between him, a small tramp, and a respectable commercial enterprise.

On another peak, on the north side of the city - Hannibal spread out on the hills, now climbing up, then easily running down to the river - there is a lighthouse. It has never been used for its intended purpose, however, to my taste, this is a memorial structure dedicated to the centenary of the writer, much closer to his nature than the heavy figure that is clearly visible from there. And to be honest, for me this circumstance is more important than the fact that the lighthouse was originally symbolically lit directly from the White House by Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself, and after the collapse as a result of a hurricane that hit these places and subsequent restoration, from there - by the then newly elected new president John Kennedy. Although the local people highly value this honor.

On the outskirts - "Mark Twain Caves". Now this labyrinth, of course, is part of a tourist complex, with all the necessary attributes - signs, lighting hidden in the walls, an obligatory guide ... It all started with the fact that a certain Jack Simms discovered the entrance to the cave during a hunt in 1819: his dogs drove a cougar into some kind of cleft on the surface of a wooded limestone hill. Thirty years later, teenager Sam Clemens enthusiastically explored the numerous passages - scars left on the surface by nature itself. Today, the owner of this piece of land, and therefore the current owner of the cave, Linda Colcherd, leads tourists along the same stone nooks and crannies - an elderly, but very mobile, pleasant lady in all respects. Leads and explains:

“Here is the cross under which Huck and Tom dug up their treasure… In this cave, Tom and Becky stumbled upon a whole garland of bats… Here, winding around the dungeon, they sat down on a stone step, and Becky fell asleep, and here the children finished the rest of their wedding cake.

From the outskirts, photographer Viktor Gritsyuk and I headed back to the center of the town, coinciding, let's say, with the center of Twenland - officially referred to in reference books as Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. That is, the institution seems to be one, but inside there is a partition separating the writer's museum from his childhood home.

The museum, in general, is like a museum - lifetime editions of books, an ancient (then, of course, completely new and generally very rare) typewriter that belonged to the writer, an insurance policy, the gown of an honorary doctor of Oxford, original illustrations by Norman Rockwell for Mark Twain's books, arguing with the level of performance with the design work of Aubrey Beardsley. Fine, but you never know in my life I have seen such literary memorials, at home and abroad. Some better, some worse.

But the House of Childhood is a completely different matter. The Clemens lived here for about ten years, approximately from 1843 to 1853, and, having changed more than one owner in its lifetime, the modest two-story building, half-covered with ivy on the outside, still retains both the noble patina of time and traces of a living human presence.

However, this house itself is only a part of the whole complex, where four or five more of its twins are closely adjacent to each other. One, on the second floor, housed the office of John Marshall Clemens, the writer's father. This Virginian, endowed with an unusually restless disposition, which forced him to constantly build Napoleonic plans and now and then get involved in all sorts of financial adventures, finally settled in Hannibal, where he corrected the position of justice of the peace.

Next to and, accordingly, directly opposite the family hearth is a mansion with a sign on the pediment: "Becky Thatcher's House." Laura Hawkins lived here with her family, with whom Tom Sawyer's beloved classmate was written off.

What else? Well, let's say, "Grant's Pharmacy" - Dr. Oliver Grant and his wife really lived here in the middle of the century before last, and for some time the Clemens family with them. Here the magistrate rested in 1847.

To the right of the family house and the pharmacy is a low fence. So what? And what follows from the index: this is the same fence for painting which Tom Sawyer so cleverly took bribes from dupes peers. It stands so firmly in place and is beautifully painted - has time really turned out to have no power?

A little further from the Twain quarter you can see two sculptural figures - Tom and Huck. Americans are a proud people. To the typical tourist from somewhere in Chicago, even from tiny Hannibal, to this day, as in the time when Mark Twain described his "simpletons abroad", it seems that the whole world is imitating America. One witty and perceptive observer writes that, once, for example, in the Holy Land, seeing Mount Zion, such a tourist will certainly exclaim: “Oh, look, well, this is the spitting image of Zenith Hill in Alabama.” So, the statement that came across to me in one advertising guide that the figures fashioned in 1926 are the world's first monument to literary heroes raised some doubts about its authenticity. But just in this case, as the audit found, skepticism turned out to be inappropriate: even the monument to Don Quixote in Spain was created later. However, competitive motives are vanity. The main thing is that the choice itself is made irreproachably: like no one else, the Marktven boys embody the American spirit of adventure, the American impulse for freedom and the American dream itself in its mythological inexplicability and beautiful impracticability. For what is a dream come true? Just a common place.

"Twain's Ark"

And we're on wheels again, heading to Florida, a place 30 or 40 miles southwest of Hannibal, where Samuel Langhorn Clemens was born 172 years ago.

Dead silence reigns here. Rare houses with curtained or even clogged windows. A dreary church, which, it seems, no one has entered for a long time. Slightly to the side is a neglected cemetery. According to reference books, at the time of Mark Twain, about seven hundred people lived here, mostly small farmers. Now - only summer residents, the owners of these very, now empty, houses.

Yes, but where is the memory of the great countryman?

And it turns out that she was moved a mile or so to the side - in the form of a two-room shack, where Samuel Clemens lived in a family of eight (including a servant) for the first three years of his life. Now this building is called quite solemnly: Mark Twain Birthplace Memorial Shrine, that is, literally - the mausoleum (ark, shrine - to choose from) of the birthplace of Mark Twain. It sounds wild, and I can easily imagine how the inhabitant of the “mausoleum” would laugh at the authors of the idea, he, for example, the editor of an agricultural newspaper, who assured his readers that swede grows on a tree. “You pea pods,” he would say, “cabbage stalks, pumpkin children, couldn’t you think of anything more witty? And in general, the rumors about my death are greatly exaggerated. And here he would be absolutely right, although, oddly enough, the inscription, in general, corresponds to reality: the hut is placed in a kind of glass frame, through which the interior decoration is clearly visible - beds and cribs, chairs and high chairs, kitchen utensils, etc. e. Opposite the “mausoleum” is a small museum room, among the exhibits of which there is a proofreading of the first edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the original contract for the publication of this novel with the London publishing house Chatto and Windus; something else, for example, another typewriter of dimensions, I must say, in contrast to the Hannibal one, quite frightening - almost the first model of this generation of civilization that was revolutionary at that time.

The museum, again, is a museum, especially since the most interesting part of it has protected itself with glass protection - it's a pity, although it's clear why. And yet the organic matter persists, yet the living breath is felt - as in Hannibal, as in the free expanse of Mark Twain Lake, which splashes below, spreading over several square miles in different sides, as well as on the overgrown paths of the adjacent reserved park. Florida is dead.

And here the guess that had flashed back in Hannibal became certainty. There is Mark Twain - there is life, there is no him - there is silence.

And in general, it was he who invented and animated everything around, it was he who gave shape to everything and, like a sculptor, cut off the excess, so maybe no memorials are required.

Bear Creek flows on the outskirts of Hannibal, not because Sam Clemens and Laura Hawkins once splashed in it (let's say), but because, returning here many years later, Mark Twain mentioned it - in "Life on the Mississippi", half a memoir, a semi-fictional book he was writing around the same time as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

And I climb Cardiff Hill, not because there is a memorial lighthouse, but because Tom Sawyer climbed there, although there was no current staircase then. And no one needs her.

And it was not without reason that Glascock Island, which really existed not far from Hannibal, went under water - only Sam Clemens visited it, but Tom Sawyer, and after him Huck Finn, explored the non-existent, but much more real and not subject to erosion, Jackson Island.

Yes, and the River itself ... However, more on that a little later, but for now we are returning from Florida to Hannibal, where it turns out that Mark Twain invented not only the town itself and its hills, and islands, and everything else, but also the people who lived here and live.

Native names: the border of the town of Moscow in the very state of Arkansas, where much of the action of "Huckleberry Finn" takes place

"Paradise" in Twain's way

On the way to Hannibal from St. Louis, where we flew in, the sign "Moscow Mills" caught my eye. A little later, we really come across a provincial, however, a clean little town, settled somewhere far from the roads, no longer any “mills”, but simply Moscow. In general, in the South, as, indeed, in any other part of America, there are a lot of places with sonorous names: Rome, Athens, Cairo, Thebes, Troy, Carthage. This can be understood: after all, people came here not just to cultivate fields, they gathered to build a City on a Hill, New Jerusalem, and for a start it was necessary to strengthen the lofty plan with names - symbols of glory and power. Or capture the universal impulse and completely unambiguously - calling the villages and streets the City of the Future or the passage of the Promised Land.

However, the "Moscow" name led to another question - about the name of the town where Tom Sawyer started all sorts of games and from where Huck and Jim later fled. I asked it to Henry Sweets, the curator, that is, the chief curator of the Mark Twain Museum Complex in Hannibal, who took care of us throughout our stay in the city, like the widow Douglas - Huck Finn, only, unlike her, completely unobtrusively.

— Why exactly St. Petersburg? I ask.

“Russia has nothing to do with it,” Henry disappoints me. - As you know, Saint Peter guards the gates leading to paradise. And according to Mark Twain, paradise is childhood. That's why the boys live in St. Petersburg.

The version, of course, is not new, and one could develop it in the sense that, unlike "Tom Sawyer", "Huckleberry Finn" is an escape, and even expulsion from paradise. But I have no desire to dive into literary matters, so I continue:

- And what, the current Geki-Toms feel comfortable in this paradise? Simply put, these guys are dear to them or just reading, school program?

“Relatives,” he says, “of course, relatives. In general, in Twain's novels there are few details and a lot of feeling, and feelings change slowly. Melville has whales and whaling - who cares these days?

Well, yes, of course, you won’t find such tomboys like Huck or Tom now, but the thirst for adventure in the boys has been preserved, they are drawn somewhere, especially if they grow up in dysfunctional families. Well, I think he's had enough. Is Moby Dick really just whales? I am afraid that if Melville is not read in America, then this does not at all indicate that the famous whaler "Pequod" has long been the property of the museum. And with the popularity of Mark Twain himself, everything is not so simple. Along the way, I will have more than one opportunity to test the optimism of the glorious and disinterested custodian - not so much a museum, but the living heritage of the artist - and then it turns out that teenagers, who at times are very reminiscent of Huck Finn in their appearance and temper (and certainly unlike Exemplary Boy Sid), most often only heard about such characters.

A five-minute walk from the museum is the pier, at which the Mark Twain sightseeing steamer sways. Captain Steve Terry leads us along it - another obvious character, well, let's say, "Old Times on the Mississippi" or, further, "Life on the Mississippi." He, however, is completely different from Horace Bixby - Sam Clemens' teacher. Instead of a thick skipper's beard, he has a sparse beard, does not smoke pipes, is not inclined to salty jokes and generally speaks surprisingly correctly, even without an accent characteristic of the natives of the American South, but, most discouragingly, he is a businessman, the owner of a travel company, a restaurant, printers, I think, also gas stations. It turns out that river walks are another source of income?

Well, not without it, of course. Nevertheless, the printing shop and everything else is just a tool, just a material support for your favorite business, which is the pilot business. It is pilotage, and not pleasure-tourism, although great skill is not required for a three-hour excursion. Even if there is no risk in the current shipping on the Mississippi for a long time. There is no real, but there is an imaginary, and this is the best experience. As the best of almost fifty years lived - those two years when, like Mark Twain once, Steve went as a "puppy" - a pilot's apprentice. And the best desk book, of course, "Life on the Mississippi." And not because everything is written there correctly about the basics of the pilot profession, but because everything is correct about its very spirit, the spirit of freedom. Forced - everyone, not only blacks, but also politicians, journalists, writers. These latter are the "slaves of the public." And only the pilot on the Mississippi did not know slavery.

Having received his diploma, Mark Twain dreamed that he would spend the rest of his days on the River and die at the helm. It didn't work out. But he, Steve Terry, the heir and offspring of his great countryman, perhaps, will fulfill that unfulfilled destiny. Although, alas, compromises have to be made.

To the wide shores, in search of freedom

It would be nice to take the Mark Twain and, lost among the other passengers, move south with the current. But then you would have to follow the tourist route, to comply once and for all with the established schedules. It’s better, for the sake of your own freedom, to continue to be content with the car, trying only not to move too far from the River.

Someone said that if it were not for her, this Mighty Mississippi - the mighty Mississippi, there would be no writer named Mark Twain. Right. What and whom she had not seen in her long life. Its white-skinned discoverers (that is, it seemed to them that they were pioneers) were met by the natives first with the roar of war drums, and then with handshakes. Thus, at the end of the 17th century, the leader of the Indians of the Chikeso tribe and the French explorer René La Salle lit the pipe of peace. It happened on the site of the future town of Napoleon in Arkansas, where we never managed - for reasons that will be discussed in due time - to reach. Unlike, say, Rene Chateaubriand, who traveled along the Mississippi in the 1820s. However, maybe he just came up with it - to get from the Great Lakes to Natchez, that is, to cross, in fact, the entire continent in two months (and the author of "American Journey" assures that it took him so much time for this enterprise), yes still by canoe, hardly possible. On the Mississippi, the semi-legendary raft driver Mike Finn performed his feats. Battles have been fought here civil war who decided the fate of the country. There were floods that decided the fate of people. Thus, reality merges with fiction, and it is not for nothing that the reverent horror of the greatness of the River was embodied in Negro chants, where it is called Ol'Man River, and in Indian legends, where it is called the "Father of the Waters."

Yes, it's true - if there were no Mississippi, there would be no Mark Twain. But it is also true that there would be no River if it weren't for Mark Twain. They are both lenders and debtors at the same time. Mississippi created Mark Twain. Mark Twain invented the Mississippi. Clearly, not the water artery that, starting in the northern part of Minnesota and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, vertically cut virtually the entire North American continent. This indifferent nature created. And Mark Twain brilliantly guessed the symbol in the River, created the mythology of freedom.

Why, say, the heroes of the novel, seeking freedom, do not flee to the North, where slavery has been abolished, but to the South, where it just flourishes - the action, I remind you, takes place 15-20 years before the start of the Civil War? Well, it's easy, of course, to make historical arguments. According to the laws then in force, a runaway slave who ended up in free territories could be returned to the owner, so that even a whole trade developed, almost a profession was formed - “black hunters” received a lot of money.

Naturally, they expected their ingenuous prey primarily on the northern routes, so that over time the fugitives laid the so-called "Underground railway”(actually not at all underground and not iron), which led to the goal in a roundabout way, that is, through the South. The main "conductor" of this road was considered none other than the famous martyr for the liberation of blacks, John Brown, who entered the song folklore.

It is in this way - to the North through the South - that our heroes are moving. But, repeating their path now, I do not think at all about the practical reasons for that choice. Because, in my opinion, Mark Twain himself did not think about it. Not only Huck, who intends to escape "to the Indian territories," but perhaps Jim, and their creator must surely dream of the metaphysical freedom of which the River is an image. Rushing to the south, it becomes more and more full-flowing, more and more spacious. And the wider the coast - more freedom

At Cairo, the Mississippi receives a powerful addition - here the Ohio River flows into it. Here, Jim and Huck were going to cut off their journey, crossing to the opposite shore, which belonged to the already free state of Illinois. But in the fog they slipped past the city.

Well, we'll stop here.

On the way from Hannibal-St. Petersburg, I happened to get lost a little, and having got lost, I slowed down to check the map at the first suitable house, especially since it seemed to Victor worthy of photographing. It wasn't there. A middle-aged man appeared on the porch and, in full accordance with his appearance, gloomily asked what we needed here. Such a beginning was clearly not conducive to secular conversation, and I only asked how to get to Cairo and whether it was possible to photograph the estate - they say, we were engaged by a well-known Russian magazine to repeat the path of Mark Twain's heroes. This "business card" did not make any impression. He allegedly did not know the way, but as for the shooting, no, such permission cannot be given, because the house does not belong to him, but to a friend, he is just a guest. I must admit that even though those years of paradise, when it was easy for me to feel like Huck Finn, had long been lost in the indistinguishable distance of time, in the course of this conversation I seemed to experience approximately the same feelings as this young tomboy, who found himself in front of the Colonel's menacing gaze. Grangerford. And that one, a well-known case, “if it used to straighten up like a Maypole, and starts throwing lightning from under thick eyebrows, then at first I wanted to climb a tree as soon as possible, and only then find out what was the matter.”

Having received a clear blow in this way, we were about to drive off, when from the opposite side they called out to us: the gentleman, no longer middle-aged, but quite old, was standing on the road and offered a sign - turn around, they say, drive up. Which we willingly did.

Before us was the same Colonel Grangerford, only in a different guise - "the kindness was such that it is impossible to say - everyone immediately saw it and felt confidence in him." Or the handsome Judge Thatcher, who put the money found by Huck and Tom in the cave into the bank, which brought them a dollar of profit every single day. And even Huck Finn himself in old age, if, of course, he lived to old age. It turned out that in his young, and in his mature years, a random stranger of ours worked on a farm, then engaged in the repair of electrical equipment, and now he has retired and settled here, not far from the Mississippi, where the breeze comes from. It cannot be said that he was so excited when he heard that his occasional and short-lived guests were a photographic artist and writer from distant Russia and that Mark Twain and Huck Finn beckoned them here. In general, I have long noticed that, unlike the inhabitants of big cities - New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, with their demonstrative disposition towards strangers, American provincials, as a rule, retain their inner dignity and naturalness in behavior. Show the way - if you please, say a few words about yourself, if asked - why not, but portray the incredible joy of meeting travelers - why would it? And in general it seemed to me that he reacted with some bewilderment to our enterprise.

One way or another, thank you ever so much, sir, you helped us out, set us on the right path. Give thanks and may good luck be with you.

The road sign says: Cairo.

Mark Twain describes it - in "Life on the Mississippi" - very briefly, noticing only that the city is very busy. Huck Finn, the narrator of his own adventures, does not describe at all, it is understandable: what can you see in the fog?

By the way, we, or rather, Victor, the whitish veil that unfriendly met us the next morning after our arrival, at first prevented us from doing our job. True, the fog dissipated rather quickly - and so what? The eye has nothing, in general, to stop. The small town crosses the highway in an arrow-like manner, which diverges at its border in two, in order to become, respectively, the canvas of bridges across both rivers. Everywhere there are clean, monotonous houses, occasionally interspersed with memorials like the Customs Museum, where the desk of General Grant, who commanded the troops of the northerners in these (as well as other) places, has been preserved.

In a word, there seems to be nothing to add to what Mark Twain said about Cairo and what Huck Finn did not say. And then, in place of the dissipated real fog, the virtual fog thickens.

Robert Lee instead of Tom Sawyer

We open a map on which an imaginary journey on a raft is traced in accordance with its authentic geographical points (it is attached to one very respectable, with an apparatus and everything that is necessary, scientific publication), and we move along this route.

For starters, Thebes. Here, a little before reaching Cairo, travelers could encounter a broken steamer or moor to an island to wait out the fog. This tiny, two or three-street settlement, nestled on the top of a hill overhanging the river, is clearly unlike the ancient Egyptian capital. An island like the one Huck mentions, it is true, there are even several islands, both upstream and downstream. There is also an old, 1848, courthouse, where a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln allegedly spoke at some trial. Specifying the way to it, we slow down at the house, on the veranda of which a married couple sits in the cool March sun. The husband, as it turned out, was over ninety, the wife was younger - some seventy-five. To be honest, Pauline and Loy Schlamacher seemed to me more like Gogol than Marktven characters - a kind of old-world landowners. A quick conversation only strengthened the first impression.

Thebes, Illinois. On the high bank of the Mississippi stands the courthouse where Twain's obscure contemporary Abraham Lincoln was rumored to have spoken.

In response to the question whether today's young America knows its great compatriot and what are the chances of finding in this wilderness the distant heirs of Huck and Tom, who may also love adventure, the retired shoemaker only snorted contemptuously:

Drugs, that's what they love!

Alas, soon I had to make sure that the grounds for this senile - and what else? - there are grumblings. That is, I won’t say anything about drugs, but the rest seems to be true. A bunch of teenagers hung around the courthouse, and two or three confirmed that yes, of course, they had read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but only because the school curriculum required it. And some people have not read it - they say, there is no time.

- What are you so busy with?

- Well, how do we communicate with each other.

- We walk on the Internet.

Okay, I think it’s not lucky with children and old people, let’s test the middle generation, fortunately here it is, in the person of two men, apparently forty-five to fifty years old, fiddling with a boat right on the river bank. It turned out - the owner of a small fish farm in Tennessee with an assistant. Everyone said: that the competition is terrible, and that recently a catfish was caught weighing 65 pounds (well, these are ordinary fishing tales), and that caviar is traded all over the world (I personally didn’t come across Penny Chisholder’s products). But the shadow of Mark Twain, which appeared at the beginning of our riverside conversation, never wove into something more tangible.

And in Columbus, where the same fictitious map led us a day or two later, everything was more or less repeated.

This place is historical - not Vicksburg, let's say, not Shiloh, not Gettysburg, but the events of the Civil War unfolded here too. In general, history throughout the American South is honored and remembered, and remembered, how to say, painfully. And the further south, the closer to the places of fatal battles, the more acutely one feels the complex of defeat that has not been completely outlived and the subconscious thirst for revenge. This can manifest itself in anything: in the numerous monuments to the Fallen Confederate, in the flags of the Union of the Eleven Breakaway States hanging over the houses, in the theatrical performances in the open air, when young men in uniforms of officers of the army of the southern army put in the saddle young ladies in crinolines. In addition, scouts are taken to the battlefields, reverently listing the names of military leaders: Lee, Anderson, Stonewall (Stone Wall) Jackson.

Just one of these ... no, an excursion is clearly the wrong word here, rather communion, even a sacrament - and so, we were witnesses of one of such sacraments. The teenagers were admonished by a young man, in front of whom gray and blue overcoats, cocked hats, rifles and pistols, which were used during the Civil War, were laid out on a long table. And from an elevation, from the very top of a hill hanging directly above the river, where the Confederates held the defense almost a century and a half ago, a noticeably older man is watching this scene. He is leaning against a cannon he dug up himself after fourteen years of research somewhere nearby. This is a relic, it is an embodied memory of those glorious and tragic times.

At some point, a red head flickers among the teenagers, which, it seems to me - although it may be just a whim of the imagination - vaguely resembles Huck Finn.

Alas! About Mark Twain, Connor Simpson, a schoolboy from the town of Paducah, Kentucky, only heard out of the corner of his ear. Another thing is Robert Lee and Jefferson Davis, these figures are familiar.

But how is it? After all, scout trips are primarily a game, an adventure. And who better than Mark Twain described the adventure and even, through the mouth of Tom Sawyer, substantiated his metaphysics (although the boy, of course, did not know such words)?

The next stop is Hickman, where Mark Twain visited or passed by more than once, first as a pilot, then as a writer. Huckleberry Finn also stayed here. It was there that he, fleeing from a broken ship, ended up on a ferry, where he told the watchman (he is also the captain, and the first assistant, and the owner of the vessel) the heartbreaking story of the death of his entire family. True, in the book the town is called Boots Landing, but it was Hickman that served as its prototype. In any case, the compilers of the same map that brought us here think so. And no one bothers me to think that the ferry transporting people and cars to the other side of the river, from Kentucky to Missouri, is the same one from Adventures ..., and the pier is the same. Heading towards it, we stopped for a bite to eat at a cafe on the embankment, and here we were very lucky: at the next table was an elderly lady, once the head of the river port, and now a volunteer of the local information center. Velda Baby "Do Yarbrough" (in quotation marks - a nickname touchingly reproduced even on a business card) took us around the town, where, indeed, a lot is associated with Twain. And above all, not even the legendary ferry, but the place where the shop stood, in front of which representatives of two warring families, the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons, started firing. Let's suppose that now the pediments of two-three-story houses lined up here in a row, shining with cleanliness, and nothing reminds of an old tribal strife, but what does it matter?

Of course, reality is always trying to refute literature. The water in the river, on the bank of which I am now standing, is not transparent, but dull yellow, and the opposite bank is not a mile and a half, as Huck imagines, but five hundred meters, and no greatness is seen in a slow current, and do not flicker on the surface black dots and the same black stripes - scows and rafts, and slowly and heavily loaded barges loaded with timber or coal. So what? I don’t even want to compare anything, having admitted in advance that Mark Twain has better eyesight than mine.

living descendants

There remained the last third of the journey, which was supposed to end in the same place where Huck and Jim were, that is, on the Phelps farm. No one knows her exact whereabouts, of course, but judging by the travel map we still follow, she's in Arkansas, somewhere between Napoleon and Columbia. But here there was a confusion. In "Life on the Mississippi" there is one gothic, in the spirit of Hoffmann or, given the humorous coloring, rather, Washington Irving, the plot is connected precisely with Napoleon: one of the participants in some intrigue, not getting along with two other conspirators, decides to go ashore here . However, it turns out that this is impossible: there is no longer any Napoleon, he was washed away by a flood. To be honest, I somehow forgot this story. But even if I remembered, I decided that since then the town has been rebuilt again, because it is on my guide map. Alas! The Cartographic Service of the State of Arkansas, as well as the whole country, does not agree with it - there is no Napoleon on official maps. No Colombia.

I had to change my original plan and move through Memphis (which Huck and Jim passed without noticing, like Cairo) to a town called Magnolia. This is another state - Mississippi. What carried us there, because our heroes obviously could not be here - also too far from the River? And the fact that Dr. Lucius Marion Lampton was waiting for us here, whose friends, even not very close ones, call Luke. And the Lamptons are Mark Twain's maternal ancestors, so the forty-year-old doctor from Magnolia takes his place of honor on family tree, being the great-great-great-grandson of Mark Twain.

First of all, Luke takes us to the cemetery at the old, first third of the 19th century, China Grove Methodist Church. Here, a few dozen miles from Magnolia, William Lampton, the cousin of Mark Twain's mother, that is, his great uncle, is buried. Shortly after the death of his mother and the remarriage of his father, he, unable to withstand the domestic oppression of his stepmother, fled down the River, reached New Orleans, then set off again, already in the opposite direction, and finally settled in one of the towns of Mississippi, where took up the construction business, got a large family and died in good time. His great-nephew was then 33 years old, he did not know his uncle, but the prodigal relative was often remembered in the family, and it is possible that he served as one of the prototypes of Huck Finn. In any case, the search for freedom led him in the same direction.

After wandering around the cemetery, where, in addition to William, other Lamptons rest - a whole family crypt, looking into the church, in which, reminiscent of the old days, the benches for blacks in the gallery are separated from the places for whites, we return to Magnolia.

Luke brings to the veranda a rocking chair that belonged to his great-great-great... and miraculously survived the winds of time, lays out books from the Mark Twain library with his notes on the table, sit next to his weather sons Garland and Crawford - the youngest of the living today heirs of the great mocker, and a conversation is begun between us, with which it seems to me appropriate to conclude this story of a trip through Twainland.

— Tell me, Luke, do you feel like Twain? Or, if you like, Clemens? Or Lampton, but not just in name? In a word, a member of the family or clan that gave birth to the phenomenon called Mark Twain?

- Well, of course, to be one of the direct, by blood, heirs of Mark Twain is a great, albeit an accidental honor. As far as I know, this feeling is shared by other living Clemens and Lamptons. Only, you see, our cousin Mark Twain would certainly have ridiculed such arrogant people as we are. Actually, he has already done it: I can see one of ours in the role of Duke or King. Twain believed that the family tree should be like potato leaves: the best part is underground. True, he had his complexes. So, let's say, like his mother, he was proud of his blood relationship with the earl family of Durham.

“Others,” you say, “ours”? Do you have something like an association of relatives of Mark Twain?

- Association, of course, no. Yes, there are a few of us left. Alas, although Mark Twain had four children, only one daughter, Clara, survived him. In October 1909, she married the Russian pianist and conductor Osip Gabrilovich. The wedding took place in Stormfield, Mark Twain's house, and he was on it, although he did not live to see the birth of his only granddaughter, Nina, who was born in August 1910. Her fate was unfortunate, she never married, remained childless, almost all her life she tried to get rid of her addiction to drugs and alcohol, and died in 1966.

Yes, there is no association, but a few years ago, other relatives from America and England gathered in Florida to open a tombstone on the grave of Mark Twain's grandfather Benjamin Lampton. Several times the daughter of the late Earl of Durham, Lucinda Lambton, came to America (“b” changed to “p” during the assimilation of the family on a new, American soil. - Approx. Aut.). It was something like a pilgrimage, she traveled from New York to the Mississippi, stopping at the cemeteries where the ashes of our ancestors rest. Sometimes I receive letters from people with whom I associate belonging to the genus. In a word, once again - there is no club, but there is a family, we try to resist the passage of time.

— It is believed that Mark Twain, more than anyone else - it does not matter, a writer, a philosopher, a politician - embodied the very spirit of what is called Americanism. What do you think?

- Well, I don’t know, it’s up to you, experts, to judge. All I can say is that Mark Twain's Americanism is not just a picture of an idyllic childhood on the banks of the Mississippi. Mark Twain is the product of eight generations of Americans, who themselves have been a product of the frontier ever since the notion arose. He did not have to look for America, she was near, at his side. On the grave of William Lampton, not only cousin mother, but also a companion of her childhood games, we have just been. And her other cousin, James, became the prototype of Colonel Sellers from the Gilded Age.

— But if so, then where does this indifference to his books come from?

- Yes, that's right, now they don't get read to them, as before. In my opinion, this indicates some serious failures in our modern culture. Today's American children are in danger of becoming intellectual beggars if they don't discover Mark Twain. And yet, still... even in the days of computers, our guys, as of old, imagine themselves as pirates, they still seek adventure in the forests, swim in rivers and streams and dream of escaping from school and home routine. The American South is full of today's Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Finns. Yes, the whole world is full of them!

I would like to believe that this is true.

And perhaps this is indeed true, indirect evidence of which is the fact that an academic (!) edition reproduced a map with the names of non-existent cities.

Nikolai Anastasiev | Photo by Viktor Gritsyuk

Among Sam's friends there were many such recklessly cheerful adventurers as himself. Will Bowen, the same age as the future writer, was not inferior to him in pranks, even if they threatened with serious consequences. Sam and Will once lowered a huge rock down Holliday Hill. Rolling down, he smashed the coppersmith's workshop to smithereens and miraculously didn't hurt anyone. In their adult years, Twain and Bowen loved to remember how they played Robin Hood, fought with toy swords and stole fruit in other people's gardens.

John Briggs was also close friends with Sam. Twain also recalled Norval Brady, whom he nicknamed Gull after the hero of Gulliver's Travels. You have with Will, John and Gull, he played robbers, flooded the rooms of the local hotel with cats - to the extreme displeasure of the residents - attacked enemies, fished, fought, attended performances of visiting actors.

Briggs, Bowen and Brady were more in the spirit of Samuel Clemens than his own younger brother Henry, kind and obedient.

It was he, Henry, who exposed the cunning of Sam, who, despite the prohibition, went to swim, ripped open the shirt collar tightly sewn by his mother, but, alas, absentmindedly sewed it up again with threads of the wrong color. It was because of him, Henry, that the rascal was subjected to a thorough beating. Sam couldn't resist the temptation to throw a huge watermelon rind right on his brother's head from a third-story window. And he launched a cobblestone at him.

There was a poor man in Hannibal from the poor - Tom Blankenship. Sam Clemens and his comrades were willingly friends with Tom, although their parents looked askance at this.

Needless to say, creating "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", Twain relied on a lot of what he saw and felt as a child himself. In the book there are even names with which he got used to from an early age. The name of the protagonist of the novel is probably taken from Tom Blankenship. Huck Finn borrowed his last name from one of Hannibal's "city drunkards" - Jim Finn. MacDowell's Cave was given the consonant name of MacDougal's Cave in the story. In passing, we note that the real name and surname of Samuel Clemens' little childhood friend, named in the story of Becky Thatcher, are transferred to the novel "The Gilded Age", main character whose name is Laura Hawkins.

And yet, in the story "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" only separate, mainly lighter, sides of the writer's childhood were reflected.

Even in his youth, Sam Clemens could not help but feel that there is also a lot of dreary, gloomy things in the world.

Recall that slavery existed in Hannibal. During Twain's youth, there was one slave for every seventh inhabitant of the town. Let, as all biographers emphasize, slavery did not take such terrible forms in Hannibal as in the more southern states, where Negroes worked on cotton plantations. But slavery remained slavery.

The Hannibal Negro merchant Bib was sold the last remaining slave of the Clemens - the Negro girl Jenny. And he sent her to the southern plantation. In his Country People, 1840-43, Twain relates that many years later, someone (perhaps himself) met Jenny on a steamboat where she was working as a maid, a black woman weeping and complaining bitterly about her fate.

Samuel Clemens' home state combined features of the American West and the American South. Far from the "old" southern states, Missouri nevertheless reflected the influence of the plantation order in its way of life.

In Hannibal, almost everyone treated slavery as a natural and inevitable phenomenon. Slavery was recognized by law; the church and generally accepted morality inspired reverence for the slave owner. But the fact that the fertile land on which Sam was born was still a land of slavery could not but leave its mark on his soul.

Twain wrote in "Autobiography": "During my school years I did not know an aversion to slavery. I did not suspect that there was anything bad in it. No one attacked him in my presence; local newspapers did not speak out against slavery; from the pulpit of the local church we were preached that God approves of it, that it is sacred ... "The writer told how, in childhood, he once got angry at a slave boy taken by his parents, a Negro Sandy. This Sandy bored him with his singing. And the mother, who also considered slavery to be something natural, but a sensitive soul, said: “If he sings, poor thing, it means that he has forgotten ... He will never see his mother again; if he is able to sing, I must not stop him, but rejoice."

Not far from the Hannibal wharf, Negroes often lay waiting for the steamer that was supposed to take them "down the river" to the cotton plantations of the South. They had, Twain recalled in his Autobiography, "extremely sad faces." At the age of ten, he witnessed how a white overseer, for some trifling offense, hit a slave on the head with a piece of iron. He soon died...

Tragic and shameful memories were associated with blacks, which even in Twain's notes recent years of his life, where the veil is lifted over the many bleak facts of the past, very little is said. Thus, the writer mentions in passing a Negro boy who took the blame for some "shameful" act committed by John Briggs and as a result was sold "down the river."

One day, Sam saw six men bring in a runaway black man. It was terrible to hear the groans of a man beaten to death.

It was not difficult even for children to understand that there is much torment in the life of a Negro. At any moment he could be hit, maimed. And the mulatto negro, even if he was completely white in skin color, completely belonged to his master. He could do with it what he wanted.

The afterlife realm of the "good black god" often seemed to blacks as a realm of rest and happiness.

hardships Everyday life slaves, their fear of the future, their uncertainty about what tomorrow would bring - all this helped to breed superstition. However, among the whites, too, a great many prejudices and absurd beliefs were widespread.

To the children of the Clemens and Quarles, and indeed to all of Sam's companions, the world seemed to be filled with ghosts, mysterious sounds, sorcery, mortal dangers. The cry of an owl, the howl of a dog - everything had its own terrible meaning. At night, the children believed, mysterious creatures appeared without arms, without legs, without a head. In the dark, you could always expect someone to grab you by the throat - maybe it's a bloodthirsty "vampire". The eyes of the animals, it seemed to the boys, burn at night with a special, unnatural light. The souls of the dead roam the world and sometimes inhabit other people. Sorcerers can deprive a person of sleep and even life. If a mouse gnaws at your clothes at night, then you are doomed to death. In order to protect yourself from all these horrors, you need to use talismans, whispers, special signs. There was a whole "science" to deal with the fear of the unknown, with sorcerers, vampires, ghosts. Children did not doubt the magical properties of hare's feet, salt, pepper, graveyard earth, the bones of the dead.

What is surprising is that Sam and his friends believed that the gray-haired black woman who lived on the Quarles farm had reached the respectable age of a thousand years and talked with Moses himself, and that the round bald spot on her head was caused by fright at the drowning of the Egyptian pharaoh. The old woman, according to everyone's belief, knew how to "cast out demons."

Life was not sweet, of course, not only for blacks, but for most whites, especially for those who were contemptuously called "white trash." In little Hannibal there were no big rich, there were no those monstrous contrasts between poverty and luxury for the few that tormented Twain at the end of his life. But the "democracy", of which many inhabitants of the Western states were proud, was a bourgeois democracy, and with each passing year social inequality did not decrease, but increased. When a certain doctor presented the authorities of Hannibal with a bill for the treatment of a poor family, the "fathers of the city" resolutely refused to pay it. A poor family, in which there was only one blanket for all adults and children, was described in the early 50s in a newspaper edited by Twain's brother, Orion Clemens. The Blankenships also begged. In Twain's notes, which were not included in his collected works, there are such lines "Blankenships. Parents - beggars, drunkards. Girls are accused of prostitution - not proven. Tom is a kind young pagan. Bens is a fisherman. The children did not attend either school or church ". The Blankenships lived next to the Clemens, in a house that looked like an abandoned barn.

In Hannibal they liked to tell different stories about the river pirates who were in charge in those places: for example, about Morrel. Their time has passed. But businessmen like Stout and Beebe robbed people no less vigorously than Morrel. Sometimes they also took the life of their victims, without resorting, however, to a knife and a pistol. There was a case when a local rich man also used a pistol. He shot a person he did not like, and this did not entail any punishment. Twain remembered the circumstances of the death of "Uncle Sam" - old man Smarr for the rest of his life. Smarr, as one witness testified during interrogation (he was led by Judge Clemens), "was no less honest man He posed no danger to anyone, but openly expressed his negative opinion of local rich people of dubious reputation. He accused Ira Stout and another wealthy businessman, William Owsley, who, as Smurr sometimes stated wine vapors, robbed two of his friends.

Deciding to take revenge, Owsley armed himself with a pistol and, meeting Smurr in the street, shot him twice from four steps. Twain says that an old bible was placed on the chest of the dying man, which, preventing him from breathing, increased his torment and accelerated his agony. Sam was then nine years old. Like all the inhabitants of Hannibal, he lived long memories of this murder. Sometimes at night it seemed to him that he was suffocating under the crushing weight of a huge book.