Borges works. Jorge Luis Borges biography

Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish Jorge Luis Borges; August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires - June 14, 1986, Geneva) - Argentine prose writer, poet and publicist.

Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. His full name is Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo), however, according to Argentine tradition, he never used it. On his father's side, Borges had Spanish and Irish roots. Borges' mother apparently came from a family of Portuguese Jews (the surnames of her parents - Acevedo and Pinedo - belong to the most famous Jewish families of immigrants from Portugal in Buenos Aires). Borges himself claimed that Basque, Andalusian, Jewish, English, Portuguese and Norman blood flows in him. Spanish and English were spoken in the house. At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's famous fairy tale The Happy Prince.

Borges himself described his entry into literature as follows: From my very childhood, when my father was struck by blindness, it was silently implied in our family that I should accomplish in literature what circumstances prevented my father from doing. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is much stronger than just expressed wishes). I was expected to be a writer. I started writing at the age of six or seven.

In 1914, the family went on vacation to Europe. However, due to the First World War, the return to Argentina was delayed. In 1918, Jorge moved to Spain, where he joined the Ultraists, an avant-garde group of poets. On December 31, 1919, the first poem by Jorge Luis appeared in the Spanish magazine "Greece". Returning to Argentina in 1921, Borges embodied ultraism in unrhymed poetry about Buenos Aires. Already in his early works, he shone with erudition, knowledge of languages and philosophy, masterfully mastered the word. Over time, Borges moved away from poetry and began to write "fantasy" prose. Many of his best stories were included in the collections Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), Intricacies (Labyrinths, 1960) and Brody's Message (El Informe de Brodie, 1971). In the story "Death and the compass" the struggle of the human intellect against chaos appears as a criminal investigation; the story "Funes, a miracle of memory" draws the image of a man literally flooded with memories.

In 1937-1946, Borges worked as a librarian, later he called this time “deeply unhappy nine years”, although it was during that period that his first masterpieces appeared. After Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was dismissed from his library post. Fate again returned to him the position of librarian in 1955, and a very honorary one - director of the National Library of Argentina - but by that time Borges was blind. Borges held the post of director until 1973.

Jorge Luis Borges, together with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, contributed to the famous Anthology of Fantastic Literature in 1940 and the Anthology of Argentine Poetry in 1941.

In the early 1950s, Borges returned to poetry; poems of this period are mostly elegiac in nature, written in classical meters, with rhyme. In them, as in his other works, the themes of the labyrinth, the mirror and the world, interpreted as an endless book, prevail.

(86 years old)

At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's famous fairy tale The Happy Prince. Borges himself described his entry into literature thus:

From my very childhood, when my father was stricken with blindness, it was silently implied in our family that I should accomplish in literature what circumstances prevented my father from doing. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is much stronger than just expressed wishes). I was expected to be a writer. I started writing at the age of six or seven.

Life in Europe

In the 1930s, Borges wrote a large number of essays on Argentinean literature, art, history, and cinema. At the same time, he begins to write a column in the magazine El Hogar, where he writes reviews of books by foreign authors and biographies of writers. Since the first issue, Borges has been a regular contributor to Sur, Argentina's leading literary magazine, founded in 1931 by Victoria Ocampo. For the Sur publishing house, Borges translates the works of Virginia Woolf. In 1937 he published an anthology of classical Argentine literature. In his works from the 1930s, the writer begins to combine fiction with reality, writes reviews of non-existent books, etc.

The end of the 1930s became difficult for Borges: first he buried his grandmother, then his father. Therefore, he was forced to financially provide for his family. With the help of the poet Francisco Luis Bernardes, the writer became a curator at the municipal library of Miguel Canet in the Almagro district of Buenos Aires, where he spent his time reading and writing books. In the same place, the writer almost died from sepsis, having broken his head. Years of work as a librarian -1946 Borges later called "nine deeply unhappy years", although it was during that period that his first masterpieces appeared. After Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was dismissed from his library post.

In 1955, after a military coup that overthrew the Peron government, Borges was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina (although already almost blind) and held this post until 1973. In December 1955, the writer was elected a member of the Argentine Academy of Literature. He actively writes and teaches in the Department of German Literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

In 1967 Borges married a girlfriend of his youth Else Estete Milan recently widowed. Three years later, however, the couple separated.

In 1972, Jorge Luis Borges travels to the USA, where he receives numerous awards and lectures at several universities. In 1973, he received the title of honorary citizen of Buenos Aires and resigned as director of the National Library.

In 1975, the premiere of the film "Dead Man" by Hector Oliver takes place, based on the story of the same name by Borges. In the same year, at the age of 99, the writer's mother dies.

After the death of his mother, Borges is accompanied on his travels by Maria Kodama, whom he marries on April 26, 1986.

Creation

Borges is one of the founders and classics of the new Latin American literature. Borges' work is metaphysical, combining fantasy and poetic methods. Borges considers the search for truth unpromising, among the themes of his work are the inconsistency of the world, time, loneliness, human destiny, death. His artistic language is characterized by a mixture of techniques of high and mass culture, a combination of abstract metaphysical universals and the realities of contemporary Argentine culture (for example, the macho cult). His prose fantasies, often taking the form of adventure or detective stories, mask discussions of serious philosophical and scientific problems; from his earliest works, the author shone with erudition and knowledge of many languages. His work is characterized by a play on the verge of truth and fiction, frequent hoaxes: references and quotations from non-existent works, fictional biographies and even cultures. Borges, along with Marcel Proust, is considered one of the first writers of the 20th century to address the problem of human memory.

Borges has been a huge influence on many genres of literature, from the absurd novel to science fiction; established writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip Dick, and Stanisław Lem have spoken of his influence.

Recognition and awards

Borges has been awarded a number of national and international literary prizes, including:

1944 - Argentine Writers' Association Grand Prix
1956 - Argentine State Prize for Literature
1961 - Formentor International Publishing Award (shared with Samuel Beckett)
1962 - Award from the National Endowment for the Arts of Argentina
1966 - Madonnina, Milan
1970 - Literary Prize of Latin America (Brazil), nominated for the Nobel Prize
1971 - Literary Jerusalem Prize
1973 - Alfonso Reyes Prize (Mexico)
1979 - Cervantes Prize (shared with Gerardo Diego) - the most prestigious award in the Spanish-speaking countries for merit in the field of literature
1979 - World Fantasy Award World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement )

Memorial plaque in Paris
at Beaux-Arts 13, where the writer lived in 1977-1984.

1980 - Chino del Duca International Literary Prize
1980 - Balzan Prize - international award for the highest achievements in science and culture
1981 - Prize of the Italian Republic, Prize "Olín Yolicli" (Mexico)
1981 - Balrog Award for Fantasy Works. Special Award
1985 - Etruria Prize
1999 US National Literary Critics Award National Book Critics Circle Award )

Borges was awarded the highest orders of Italy (1961, 1968, 1984), France (Order of Arts and Letters, 1962, Order of the Legion of Honor, 1983), Peru (Order of the Sun of Peru, 1965), Chile (Order of Bernardo O'Higgins, 1976), Germany (Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for Germany, 1979), Iceland (Order of the Icelandic Falcon, 1979), Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE, 1965), Spain (Order of Alfonso X the Wise, 1983), Portugal (Order of Santiago , 1984). The French Academy in 1979 awarded him a gold medal. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), an honorary doctorate from leading universities in the world. In 1990, one of the asteroids was named en:11510 Borges.

After death

Borges and the work of other artists

In the film of the Argentine film director Juan Carlos Desanso Love and Fear (), the role of Borges was played by the famous actor Miguel Angel Sola.

The Chilean writer Volodya Teitelboim wrote the book "Two Borges" - a biography of Borges.

Books

Brody's messages

Tiger Gold

Notes

Find a Grave - 1995. - ed. size: 165000000
todotango.com
Internet Speculative Fiction Database - 1995.
German National Library, Berlin State Library, Bavarian State Library, etc. Record #118513532 // General Regulatory Control (GND) - 2012-2016.
Record #11892985q // general catalog of the National Library of France
Borges, Jorge Luis- article from the encyclopedia "Round the World"

August 24 marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Jorge Luis Borges.
Homer was the Great Blind Man of antiquity. Perhaps Borges could be called the Great Blind of the 20th century...

Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish Jorge Luis Borges; August 24, 1899, Buenos Aires - June 14, 1986, Geneva) - Argentine prose writer, poet and publicist. Borges is best known for his laconic prose fantasies, often disguised as discussions of serious scientific problems or taking the form of adventure or detective stories. The effect of the authenticity of fictitious events is achieved by Borges by introducing episodes of Argentine history and the names of contemporary writers, facts of his own biography into the narrative. In the 1920s, he became one of the founders of avant-garde art in Hispanic Latin American poetry.

Biography

Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. His full name is Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, however, according to Argentine tradition, he never used it. On his father's side, Borges had Spanish and Irish roots. Borges's mother apparently came from a family of Portuguese Jews (the surnames of her parents - Acevedo and Pinedo - belong to the most famous Jewish families of immigrants from Portugal in Buenos Aires). Borges himself claimed that "Basque, Andalusian, Jewish, English, Portuguese and Norman blood" flows in him. Spanish and English were spoken in the house. At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's famous fairy tale The Happy Prince.

Borges himself described his entry into literature thus:

From my very childhood, when my father was stricken with blindness, it was silently implied in our family that I should accomplish in literature what circumstances prevented my father from doing. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is much stronger than just expressed wishes). I was expected to be a writer. I started writing at the age of six or seven.

In 1937-1946, Borges worked as a librarian, later he called this time “nine deeply unhappy years,” although it was during that period that his first masterpieces appeared. After Perón came to power in 1946, Borges was dismissed from his library post. Fate again returned to him the position of librarian in 1955, and a very honorary one - director of the National Library of Argentina - but by that time Borges was blind. Borges held the post of director until 1973.

Jorge Luis Borges, together with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, contributed to the famous Anthology of Fantastic Literature in 1940 and the Anthology of Argentine Poetry in 1941.

Recognition and awards

Since the 1960s Borges has been awarded a number of national and international literary prizes, including:
* 1956 - Argentine State Prize for Literature
* 1961 - Formentor International Publishing Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett)
* 1970 - Literary Prize of Latin America (Brazil)
* 1971 - Literary Jerusalem Prize
* 1979 - Cervantes Prize (together with Gerardo Diego) - the most prestigious award in the Spanish-speaking countries for merit in the field of literature.
* 1980 - Chino del Duca International Literary Prize
* 1980 - Balzan Prize - international award for the highest achievements in science and culture
Borges was awarded the highest orders of Italy (1961, 1968, 1984), France (1962), Peru (1964), Chile (1976), Germany (1979), Iceland (1979), the Order of the British Empire (1965) and the Order of the Legion of Honor ( 1983). The French Academy in 1979 awarded him a gold medal. He was elected a member of the Academy in the United States (1967), an honorary doctorate from leading universities in the world.
Borges died in Geneva on June 14, 1986 and was buried in the Royal Cemetery in Geneva, not far from John Calvin. In February 2009, the National Congress of Argentina will consider a bill to return the ashes of Jorge Luis Borges to Buenos Aires. This initiative comes from representatives of literary circles, but the writer's widow, who heads the foundation named after him, objects to the transfer of the remains of Borges to Argentina.

In 2008, a monument to Borges was unveiled in Lisbon. The composition, cast according to the sketch of fellow writer Federico Bruc, according to the author, is deeply symbolic. It is a granite monolith in which a bronze hand of Borges is inlaid. According to the sculptor, who made a cast from the writer's hand in the 1980s, this symbolizes the creator himself and his "poetic spirit". The opening of the monument, installed in one of the parks in the city center, was attended by the widow of the writer Maria Kodama, who heads the foundation named after him, prominent figures of Portuguese culture, including Nobel laureate José Saramago.

In 1969, Bernardo Bertolucci filmed the film Spider Strategy (Italian: La Strategia Del Ragno) based on Borges's story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero".

Borges served as the prototype for one of the characters in the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

In 2009, within the framework of the photobiennale “Fashion and Style in Photography”, an exhibition “Charms of the Yellow Emperor” was opened by Belarusian photographers Andrei Shukin, Denis Nedelsky and Alexei Shlyk. According to the organizers, the project of the exhibition arose after reading the book of the same name by Borges.

Pyotr Weil about Borges::
“The Nobel Committee, like any intellectual community, consists of people of leftist convictions. Leftists, of course, in European terminology. That is why one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Borges, did not win the Nobel Prize. The thing is that he paid a visit to Pinochet, shook his hand and praised him for crushing the communists. At the same time, everyone understood the greatness of Borges as a writer, but they did not forgive Pinochet.

Bibliography

Borges, who worked as a librarian despite his blindness, imagined heaven as a library:

Just as night and day are mixed at twilight, and water and foam are mixed in the waves, two diverse principles are inseparably connected in the book. The book is one of the surrounding things, one of the three-dimensional objects, but at the same time it is a symbol, like algebraic equations or general ideas. In this sense, it can be compared to chess, which is at the same time a black and white checkered board with pieces, and an almost infinite number of possible maneuvers and tricks. Another obvious analogy is with a musical instrument, say, with a harp, which Becker dreamed of in the corner of the living room and whose numb sonorous world reminded him of a sleeping bird. But all these images are just juxtapositions and similarities: the book is much more complicated. Written symbols are a reflection of oral ones, and those, in turn, are a reflection of abstract concepts, dreams or memories. Perhaps it is the letter that makes the book (as well as the people who believe in it) a dual unity of soul and body. Hence the manifold pleasure that awaits us in it: the happiness of seeing, touching and thinking at the same time. Everyone imagines paradise in their own way; from my childhood it seemed to me like a library. But the library is not infinite - in any infinity there is something clumsy and inexplicable - but proportionate to a person. A library where still unknown books always remain (and maybe entire shelves), but not too many. In short, a library that promises the pleasure of the classics - and the pleasant anxieties of discoveries and accidents.<...>
(H.L. Borges)

Probably, there is no bitterer grief and more piercing suffering than the loss of sight for a bookish person. The light in Borges' eyes began to fade even before the Second World War, and the writer (who lived for 87 years) spent most of his life without seeing the world. Saved and supported books. In the supersaturated solution of the memory of Borges the reader, not a single crystal was wasted. What was read and thought turned into written.

The first small collection of Borges' prose in Russian was published in 1984, during the author's lifetime. Prior to this, Russian bookworms fed on rumors about the unusual Argentinean and read articles by literary critics in which Borges was quoted respectfully - and disapprovingly. Now the writings of Borges are available to everyone, but those who want to read him and who have the opportunity to buy his books have become less than twenty times. Not before.

Aleph and The Garden of Forking Paths are Borges' main books. Short stories, miniatures, essays make an incomparable impression. As if declaring war on verbosity, Borges creates an image of literature, a sign of a work. The genres he developed are a preface to a non-existent book (“Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote”), a model of a possible world (“Tlen, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), a quasi-scientific treatise (“The Book of Fictional Beings”), a biography of a fictional writer (“ An analysis of the work of Herbert Quain).

Unable to see the books, Borges worked for many years as director of the National Library of Argentina. His whole life was spent among books and in the name of books, and he himself gradually became a book legend, a man-book, a writer who produces a text faster and more willingly than an ordinary person in everyday life says simple things. Any prose fragment of Borges falls on the reader like a downpour from a clear sky: no preparation, immediately slashing razors of thoughts, careless references to the well-known (read by few), paradoxes and maxims:

Borges terribly wants to imitate. It is worth trying - and it turns out that this is impossible.

Jorge Luis Borges "Poems"

Years of life: from 08/24/1899 to 06/14/1986

An outstanding Argentine poet, writer, literary critic, philologist, philosopher.

Born August 24, 1899 in Buenos Aires. His full name is Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (Spanish Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo), however, according to Argentine tradition, he never used it. On his father's side, Borges had Spanish and Irish roots. Borges' mother apparently came from a family of Portuguese Jews (the surnames of her parents - Acevedo and Pinedo - belong to the most famous Jewish families of immigrants from Portugal in Buenos Aires). Borges himself claimed that Basque, Andalusian, Jewish, English, Portuguese and Norman blood flows in him. Spanish and English were spoken in the house. At the age of ten, Borges translated Oscar Wilde's famous fairy tale The Happy Prince.

He studied in Switzerland, in 1918 he moved to Spain, where he joined the ultraists, an avant-garde group of poets. Returning to Argentina in 1921, Borges embodied ultraism in unrhymed poetry about Buenos Aires. Already in his early works, he shone with erudition, knowledge of languages and philosophy, masterfully mastered the word. Over time, Borges moved away from poetry and began to write "fantasy" prose. Many of his best stories were included in the collections Fictions (Ficciones, 1944), Intricacies (Labyrinths, 1960) and Brody's Message (El Informe de Brodie, 1971). In the story Death and the compass, the struggle of the human intellect against chaos appears as a criminal investigation; the story of Funes, a miracle of memory, paints the image of a man literally flooded with memories.

In 1955, Borges was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina, a post he held until 1973. In the early 1950s, he returned to poetry; poems of this period are mostly elegiac in nature, written in classical meters, with rhyme. In them, as in his other works, the themes of the labyrinth, the mirror and the world, interpreted as an endless book, prevail.

In 1961, Borges shared the International Publishing Prize with S. Beckett. His later poems were published in The Maker (El Hacedor, 1960), Praise of the Shadow (Elogia de la Sombra, 1969) and Gold of the Tigers (El oro de los tigres, 1972). In 1979, Borges received the Cervantes Prize, the most prestigious award in Spanish-speaking countries for merit in the field of literature. His last lifetime publication was the book Atlas (Atlas, 1985) - a collection of poems, fantasies and travel notes.

Borges died of liver cancer in Geneva on June 14, 1986, and was buried in the Royal Cemetery in Geneva, not far from John Calvin. One emigrant reported that at first no one could not only make out the content of the tombstone, but even establish what language it was written in. The mailing to the philological departments of Geneva yielded the result: a quotation from Beowulf. “Obviously an epitaph,” the emigrant concludes, “carefully selected and designed for many years of controversy among exegetes.” In February 2009, the Argentine National Congress was to consider a bill to return the ashes of Jorge Luis Borges to Buenos Aires. This initiative came from representatives of literary circles, but the writer's widow, who heads the foundation named after him, objects to the transfer of the remains of Borges to Argentina.

Aliases:

Honorio Bustos Domecq

In 1965, Piazzolla collaborated with Jorge Luis Borges, composing music for his poems.

In 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci filmed the film Spider Strategy (Italian: La Strategia Del Ragno) based on Borges's story "The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero".

Borges is bred in The Name of the Rose. Eco himself in "Marginal Notes on the Name of the Rose" spoke about this as follows: "I needed a blind man to guard the library. I considered this a winning novel situation. But the library plus the blind man, whatever one may say, equals Borges."

In 1990, one of the asteroids was named en:11510 Borges.

Writer's Awards

Since the 1960s Borges has been awarded a number of national and international literary prizes, including:
1944 - Argentine Writers' Association Grand Prix
1956 - Argentine State Prize for Literature
1962 - Award from the National Endowment for the Arts of Argentina
1961 - Formentor International Publishing Award (shared with Samuel Beckett)
1966 - Madonnina, Milan
1970 - Literary Prize of Latin America (Brazil), nominated for the Nobel Prize
1971 -
1973 - Alfonso Reyes Prize (Mexico)
1979 - (together with Gerardo Diego) - the most prestigious award in the Spanish-speaking countries for merit in the field of literature
1979 - (en: World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement)
1980 - Chino del Duca International Literary Prize
1980 - Balzan Prize - international award for the highest achievements in science and culture
1981 - Prize of the Italian Republic, Prize "Olín Yolicli" (Mexico)
1985 - Etruria Prize
1999 - National Book Critics Circle Award

Borges was awarded the highest orders
Italy (1961, 1968, 1984),
France (Order of Arts and Letters, 1962,
Order of the Legion of Honor, 1983),
Peru (Order of the Sun of Peru, 1965),
Chile (Order of Bernardo O "Higgins, 1976),
Germany (Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for the Federal Republic of Germany, 1979),
Iceland (1979)
Order of the British Empire (1965),
Spain (Order of Alfonso X the Wise, 1983),
Portugal (Order of Santiago, 1984).

The French Academy in 1979 awarded him a gold medal.
He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1968), an honorary doctorate from leading universities in the world.

Bibliography

Books

Novels and stories

Anthologies
1940 Anthology of fantastic literature / Co-authors: Adolfo Bioy Casares, Silvina Ocampo
1943 / Co-author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
1955 Collection of short and extraordinary stories / Co-author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
1960 [= Book of Heaven and Hell; The Book of Heaven and Hell] /Co

Collections
1925
1926 Land of my hope
1928 Language of the Argentines [= Speech of the Argentines]
1930 Evaristo Carriego
1932 Discussion [= Debate]
1935 [= World history of baseness; General History of Infamy; General history of forgeries]
1936 The Story of Eternity
1942 [= Six problems for Don Isidro Parodi] / Co-author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
1944 [= Fiction]
1944 Fictional Stories [= Fiction]
1946 Two memorable fantasies
1952 New investigations
1960 Creator [= Maker]
1967 The Chronicles of Bustos Domech / Co-author: Adolfo Bioy Casares
1967 [= Encyclopedia of fairy creatures; The Book of Imaginary Beings; Bestiary] / Co-author: Margarita Guerrero
1969 Praise the Dark [= Praise the Shadow]
1970 Brody Post
1972 Tigers Gold
1975 The Book of Sand
1977 History of the Night
1977 Preface
1981 Cryptography
1982 Nine Essays on Dante [= Ten Essays on Dante]
1984 Atlas
1985 Bail
1986 Left under wraps
1988 Personal library (pro "logos)

Screen adaptations of works, theatrical performances

thesis of Alexander Kaidanovsky (1983) "Garden" (based on the novel "The Garden of Forking Paths")

the film by Alexander Kaidanovsky "The Guest" (1989) based on two short stories by Borges at once - "Three versions of the betrayal of Judas" and "The Gospel of Mark".

Jorge Luis Borges(Jorge Luis Borges) (08/24/1899 [Buenos Aires] - 06/14/1986 [Geneva]) - an outstanding Argentine poet, writer, literary critic, philologist, philosopher.

On a winter day, August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, in the family of the lawyer Jorge Guillermo Borges (1874-1938) and Leonor Acevedo de Borges (1876-1975), who lived on Tucuman Street, located between Suipacha and Esmeralda Streets, in a house that belonged to parents Leonor, a child was born, named Jorge Luis. The child spent most of his childhood at home.

His father was also an agnostic philosopher, maternally related to the Hazle family of Staffordshire, England. He collected a huge library of English-language literature. Fanny Hazlem, grandmother of Jorge Luis, taught English to her children and grandchildren. Borges spoke this language superbly: at the age of 8 he translated Wilde's tale - and so translated that it was published in the magazine " South"("Sur"). Borges later translated Virginia Woolf, passages from Faulkner. Kipling's stories, chapters from " Finnegans Wake» Joyce. Probably, from the English, he took over the love of paradoxes, essayistic lightness and plot entertaining. Many writers joked that Borges was an English writer writing in Spanish.

« From my very childhood, when my father was stricken with blindness, it was silently implied in our family that I should accomplish in literature what circumstances prevented my father from doing. This was taken for granted (and such a conviction is much stronger than just expressed wishes). I was expected to be a writer. I started writing at the age of six or seven».

In 1914 the family went to Europe. In the fall, Jorge Luis began attending Geneva College. In 1919 the family moved to Spain, December 31, 1919 in the magazine " Greece"appeared the first poem by Jorge Luis, in which the author" tried hard to be Walt Whitman". Soon he is included in the group of "ultraists", which was said in Soviet literary criticism that she expressed " anarchic revolt of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia against petty-bourgeois vulgarity and bourgeois narrow-mindedness».

Borges himself did not write anything intelligible about his "ultraism". In general, it looks like a young Mayakovsky: “ The deck changed life. Colored cardboard talismans erased everyday fate, and a new smiling world transformed the stolen time...».

In Buenos Aires in 1921, our hero returned as a poet. By 1930 he had written and published seven books, founded three magazines and contributed to twelve more, and in the late twenties he began to write short stories. " The period from 1921 to 1930 was full of vigorous activity for me, but, perhaps, essentially reckless and even aimless.", - he will formulate later.

Around 1937, he first entered the library for a permanent service, where he spent " nine deeply unhappy years". Here he, leading the quiet life of a bookworm, wrote a whole scattering of masterpieces:

« Pierre Menard», « Tlen, Ukbar, Orbis Tertius», « Lottery in Babylon», « Babylon library», « Garden of Forking Paths". There was little work, and little money was paid. The activity had to be imitated - everything was quite Soviet.

« I did all my library work in the first hour, and then quietly went into the basement book depository and read or wrote for the remaining five hours ... The male employees were only interested in horse racing, football competitions, and smutty stories. One of the readers was raped while walking into the women's room. Everyone said that this could not have happened, since the women's room is next to the men's.».

Composition " Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" (1938) Borges himself defined as the middle between an essay and " real story". However, the concepts of classical Borges are seen here in their entirety. The fictional writer Pierre Menard, nevertheless bibliographically described as real (the composition of his archive is listed in detail), tried to compose " Don Quixote».

« He did not want to compose a second Don Quixote - it would not be difficult - but precisely Don Quixote. Needless to say, he did not at all mean mechanical copying, did not intend to rewrite the novel. His bold idea was to create several pages that would match - word for word and line for line - with those written by Miguel de Cervantes". The method was: Learn Spanish well, revive the Catholic faith, fight the Moors or the Turks, forget the history of Europe between 1602 and 1918...».

However, this method was rejected as too easy. It was necessary to remain Pierre Menard and still come to " Don Quixote". Further it turns out that Menard to " Don Quixote” nevertheless came, i.e. the texts coincide verbatim, although the meanings they express, according to Borges, are completely different. The whole story is built around this paradox. For Borges, it was a game of the mind, a kind of fun.

But it was from this text, composed in the basement of the library in 1938, that a whole literary movement subsequently grew. Story " Pierre Menard” came in handy 30-40 years after its creation, when the fame of Borges, especially in the USA, was very powerful. Postmodernism calculated by Borges, modeled by him in this story.

In a postmodern context, the story is devoted to the fact that new texts are impossible, that the number of texts is generally limited, and besides, all of them have already been written. There are so many books that it is simply not possible or even worth writing new ones. Wherein " Don Quixote"more real than Pierre Menard, who is not really there, i.e. literature is more real than the writer himself. Therefore, it is not the writer who writes books, but already finished books from the Universal Library (Borges gave her image in “ Babylon library”, written in the same basement) write themselves as writers, and the writer turns out to be a “repeater”, the fundamental possibility of which was proved by the example of Pierre Menard. In following what has already been written, someone else's word, someone else's thought, there is a kind of fatalism and a sense of the end of literature. " I, - says Pierre Menard, - are led by a mysterious duty to literally reproduce his (Cervantes - M.Z.) spontaneously created novel».

In essence, Jorge Luis, wanting to get to India, discovered America. There is no doubt that the writing librarian, whose desk was in close proximity to the bookcase, himself acutely felt his dependence as a writer on what had already been published. Books crushed, forcing someone else's word not to assimilate and dissociate, but to keep it in its natural originality.

In the collection " Tiger Gold(1972) Borges published the novel " Four cycles". The idea is simple:

There are only four stories. The first is about a fortified city, which is stormed and defended by heroes. The second is about returning. The third is about searching. The fourth is about the suicide of God.

« There are only four stories, - Borges repeats in the finale. - And no matter how much time we have left, we will retell them - in one form or another". In essence, this is the ideology of the reader, transposed into the technology of writing. And it is this transposition that can be considered the main and epoch-making invention of Borges.

He invented the "typewriter" (somewhat reminiscent of Raymond Lull's logical machine invented in the thirteenth century, which he loved to write about), a continuously running text generator that produces new texts from old ones and thus keeps literature from dying. " As an instrument of philosophical inquiry, the logical machine is an absurdity. However, it would not be absurdity as an instrument of literary and poetic creativity.', Borges notes.

Thanks to his invention, by the end of the 20th century, literary studies became the property of everyone, including people without talent or even abilities. You just have to be a reader. So Borges did a great job of ensuring the principles of democracy and equality in literature by introducing the appropriate technology of "legitimate plagiarism."

Borges was, of course, a reader and bibliographer who turned these two pursuits into literature. But it was also the fact that he was able to very accurately choose material that corresponded to the philosophical and scientific-methodological topic of the day. Having no place to delve into the details, I will only say that, for example, the same “ Garden of Forking Paths”corresponds both with structuralism in general, and with the hermeneutics of Gadamer, and with the works of the Baden school of neo-Kantianism (G. Rickert, W. Windelband), relevant in the second half of the 20th century. From the library to death.

In 1946, the dictatorship of President Peron was established in Argentina. Borges was immediately expelled from the library, as the new regime was dissatisfied with his writings and sayings. As Borges himself recalled, he was “honored with a notice” that he was promoted: he was transferred from the library to the position of inspector for the poultry and rabbit trade in city markets. So Borges lived painfully as an unemployed man from 1946 until 1955, when the dictatorship was overthrown by the revolution.

True, in 1950 he was elected president of the Argentine Society of Writers, which was one of the few strongholds of resistance to the dictatorship, but this society was soon dissolved. In 1955, a revolution took place, and Borges was appointed director of the National Library and professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires.

But it all came too late, just like the French proverb says: when we get pants, we no longer have an ass". By 1955, Borges had completely lost his sight. " Fame, like blindness, came to me gradually. I never looked for her". His first books in the 1930s and 1940s failed, and " The story of eternity”, published in 1936, was bought by 37 people in a year, and the author was going to go around all the buyers to their homes to apologize and say thank you. In the 1950s Borges becomes world famous, in the 1960s he is already considered a classic.

Perhaps the sudden fame of Borges was the success of the "new novel", a detailed manifesto of which " Age of Suspicion” Nathalie Sarraute published just in 1950. " ... When a writer, - wrote Sarrot, - thinks of telling some story and imagines how he will have to write "The Marquise left at five" and with what mockery the reader will look at it, doubts seize him, his hand does not rise ...» To this we must add disappointment in the reality described in the novel, and a feeling of boredom from traditional descriptive means (“The Marquise left at five”).

What the evolution of the European novel came to, Borges already had ready-made. Not surprisingly, in the mid-1970s, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he did not receive it, as is commonly believed, "for political reasons" - Borges, who was completely uninterested in politics, imprudently accepted the Order of Bernardo O'Higgins from Pinochet's hands during a visit to Chile.

In 1974, he resigned as director of the National Library and began to live in seclusion in a small apartment in Buenos Aires. A modest, lonely old man. Author of the books History of eternity"(1936)," fictional stories"(1944)," Aleph"(1949)," New investigations"(1952)," Creator"(1960)," Brody's message"(1970)," sand book"(1975) and others. Commander of the Italian Republic, Commander of the Order of the Legion of Honor "For Merit in Literature and Art", Commander of the Order of the British Empire "For Distinguished Service" and the Spanish Order of the Cross of Alphonse the Wise, Honorary Doctor of the Sorbonne, Oxford and Columbia Universities , winner of the Cervantes Prize. And that's just part of the title.

In 1981, he still states: And yet, I don't feel like I've exhausted myself. In a sense, the youthful enthusiasm seems to have become closer to me than when I was a young man. Now I no longer believe that happiness is unattainable ...»

In 1986 he died of liver cancer. Buried in Geneva. One emigrant reported that at first no one could not only make out the content of the tombstone, but even establish what language it was written in. The mailing to the philological departments of Geneva yielded the result: a quotation from Beowulf. " Obviously an epitaph, - the emigrant concludes, - carefully selected and designed for many years of controversy among exegetes". However, in Russia the text of the inscription is not known.

In 1982, in a lecture entitled " Blindness Borges stated: If we consider that darkness can be a heavenly blessing, then who "lives on his own" more than a blind man? Who can study himself better? To use a phrase from Socrates, who can know himself better than a blind man?»

Borges not only cognized, but also transformed his difficult fate into creative matter. The accumulation of cultural images and symbols is a consequence; the reason is captured in the feeling of being the last offspring of the family, a dead-end branch that will never give an escape. The writer had neither a wife nor children, he was drawn to his sister Nora and his mother, who partially served as a writer's wife:

« She has always been my comrade in everything - especially in recent years, when I began to go blind - and an understanding, condescending friend. For many years, until the very last years, she did all the secretarial work for me ... It was she ... who calmly and successfully contributed to my literary career».

The feeling of being “finishing”, from which my heart shrinks, gave Borges a tragic attitude (with motives of loneliness and imprisonment) and an attitude towards collecting an anthology, a compendium of world thought and culture, a “sum”. Hence the generally alienated view of culture, the view of the traveler or dispassionate appraiser looking at what does not belong to him, and hence the fundamental feature of Borges, which he taught, more precisely, infected world literature after the 1970s and later: free play with cultural deposits, laying out mosaics from cultural smalt.

The most noticeable manifestation of the game is the description of virtual reality. The pinnacle of Borges' activity in this direction are two books - “ fictional stories" And " Aleph". The imitation of these two books has generated and continues to generate a colossal volume of imitative literary production. Borges attributes everything invented to ordinary reality, inserts it into it, but according to a certain principle.

This principle lies in the completion of reality to logical completeness: certain parameters or a combination of features that are not implemented in our reality are pre-assigned or deductively determined, and a virtual reality is built with these parameters and features. Thus, logically possible “cells” of a certain global table are filled. This is a strictly scientific structuralist approach.

Let's say the central (for this part of Borges' work) text is " Babylon Library" - draws a kind of Library that contains all theoretically conceivable books, including " the most detailed history of the future, autobiographies of the archangels, the correct catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, proof of the falsity of the correct catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, a commentary on this gospel, a commentary on the commentary on this gospel, a true account of your own death, translation of each book into all languages ... a treatise that could have been (but was not) written by Beda on the mythology of the Saxons, the missing writings of Tacitus».

On the one hand, this is a pure fantasy game. On the other hand, these fantasies, composed in the late thirties and early forties, are the stock of images from which science borrowed its models. As a rule, scientific models arise on the basis of figurative models drawn from a common cultural reservoir, and Borges was one of those who contributed a lot to this reservoir.

It is reliably known, for example, that for the famous French culturologist Michel Foucault, invented by Borges in the story " The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” (1952) classification from “one Chinese encyclopedia” served as an impetus for the creation of an “archeology of knowledge”. It was in Borges that the "father of structuralism" K. Levi-Strauss could find the prototypes of his theory of myth. In particular, Borges' idea of " feverish Library, in which random volumes in a continuous solitaire turn into others, mixing and denying everything that was asserted like a mad deity”, directly refer to the explication of the myth as a tool for neutralizing binary oppositions, proposed by Levi-Strauss.

His "Structure of myths", in which the myth is analyzed, proceeding immediately from all the options in which it exists, corresponds with " Garden of Forking Paths". It is appropriate to compare with the images of Borges from the story " Funes, miracle of memory"(1944) study" Fundamentals of language» (1956) by R. Jacobson and M. Halle, in which the metonymic and metaphorical codes are highlighted. All the same " Garden of Forking Paths” can be compared with the images of A. Kolmogorov’s algorithmic information theory, and “ Letters of God» - with Kolmogorov's algorithmic complexity theory; " Analysis of the work of Herbert Quain- with structuralist plot theories. The definition of "plot space" given by Yu. Lotman in 1988 follows directly from Borges's ideas about the completion of real books with virtual ones. Etc.

Be that as it may, whether Levi-Strauss, Jacobson and Lotman used the images of Borges or not (academician Kolomogorov - probably not, and Lotman - probably yes, since the Tartu school kept Borges in sight), but Borges is a unique case: many of his figurative models are analogous to the scientific models of the 20th century and often anticipate them. His thinking is immanently structural and linguistic.

IN " decay"(1938) describes a virtual civilization in which culture consists of only one discipline - psychology, and "the inhabitants of this planet understand the world as a series of mental processes unfolding not in space, but in a temporal sequence." This is the picture of the world that occurs with certain types of aphasia, when only one hemisphere is working. Borges had such a picture long before the publication of writings on the functional asymmetry of the brain. In general, "Tlen" contains a lot of all sorts of heuristically valuable ideas. For example, about literary criticism in Tlön: “ Criticism sometimes invents authors: two different works are chosen - for example, "Tao Te Ching" and "A Thousand and One Nights", - are attributed to one author, and then conscientiously determine the psychology of this curious homme de lettres ...". Nobody has walked this path yet, but it promises a lot.

The game principle, which Borges reaffirmed with his authority in the literature of the twentieth century, has passed through all his work, leading to the fact that ontological (death, life) and epistemological (space, time, number) categories turn into symbols that can be treated as as freely as with literary images or cultural signs (cross, rose, mirror, dream, circle, sphere, labyrinth, chance, lottery, etc.). Blindness, as a kind of step on the road to death, gave not only a feeling of isolation in the world of images, in the world of culture, but also a clear freedom in dealing with the concept of non-existence. And above all - the removal of the opposition of reality and unreality, which concept by the end of the twentieth century became the property of mass culture and served to spread the glory of Borges.

For him, the real/unreal antithesis did not exist, and he lived in the world of texts, feeling like his own character, a book that he himself writes. Moreover, he writes a book in which he is described, who writes a book in which he again writes a book ... and so on ad infinitum, which is immortality, because time is specialized.

Borges not only cognized, but also transformed his difficult fate into creative matter. The accumulation of cultural images and symbols is a consequence; the reason is caught in the feeling of being the last offspring of the family, a dead-end branch that will never escape ...