The unforgettable

The essays are intended for the new edition of the book prepared by the author: Mann Yu.V. Memory as happiness and memory as pain. Moscow: RSUH, 2011. These essays are dedicated to memorable events whose witness the author was (the rally at the Russian White House during the August Putsch of 1991) and to remarkable people whom he was acquainted with. These are Solomon K. Apt, a literary studies scholar and translator of T. Mann's, F. Kafka's, H. Hesse's and R. Musil's books, and Alexander M. Revich, a poet and translator (he was given the State award for translating “Tragic poems” by Agrippina de Obinji). Both have much in common: first of all, talent, nobility, responsiveness and the hard life way behind. Being no dissident, Solomon Apt influenced his friends and acquiantances in a certain way. This effect can be described in the words by Apt himself said about his teacher, the MSU professor Sergey Radtsig: those who communicated with him were given a “humanistic vaccination”. The same humanistic vaccination was given to those who met Solomon Apt, and he displayed no sign of affectation or snobbishness, only faithfulness to himself and his character. Those who met Alexander Revich could hardly guess what a heavy past experience is kept in his memory: the war, captivity (“the famished camp”), an escape from captivity, the penal battalion, Stalingrad, a heavy wound… It is not so much stories told by Revich as his books where one could discover all this, first of all his “Poem of the Road”. Among the misfortunes experienced by him the most dreadful was the death sentence (shooting) and its cancellation. This time gap from one fatal mark to the other opens the abyss unseen by other people for a sentenced man. We know that from Dostoevsky, we feel it reading Alexander Revich's confessionary works. Literary portraits of Solomon Apt and Alexander Revich should help the reader more deeply understand their creative work.