The author of the article, an indologist who studies the work of Indian English-language writers, has recently presented several essays on various aspects of S. Rushdie's life and work to the readers of our magazine. In this final essay, the author analyzes the originality and originality of S. Rushdie's novels through the prism of the most important stages of his biography, his spiritual world, in particular, the writer's attitude to religion, including Islam.

E. KALINNIKOVA, Candidate of Philological Sciences

What is known
no use.
One unknown is needed.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

For more than a quarter of a century* the name of the Indian writer Salman Rushdie has attracted the attention of readers from all over the world, because his work is unique and unusual.

S. Rushdie has an amazing ability to intrigue the reader with an extraordinary plot with mystical seasoning and humor that reaches satire, turning into the grotesque. He does not lose touch with the reader and skillfully supports it with lyrical digressions, in which he shares his revelations in the form of a monologue or dialogue, then intrigues the interlocutor with parables about the Simurgh bird or Sleeping Beauty, and sometimes plunges into the stream of events of recent history and calls in his native Urdu language: "dunya dekho" - " look at the world". And the reader really sees pictures not of imperial India, but of modern Bombay, Karachi, Islamabad, the invasion of Chinese troops in India during the border conflicts of the early 60s and the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in the late 70s. He describes ancient Mecca and Medina, but does not forget to show the London of our days, crowded with immigrants from the East. It makes the reader "witness" the murder of a Pakistani girl in the English capital. She is not the heroine of his novel, but only represented as a victim of religious dogmatists, a spectacular illustration of the chronicle of criminal events.

HIS BOOKS ARE LIKE MAGNETS THAT ATTRACT THE ATTENTION OF READERS

When Rushdie confronts the present with the past or the past with the future, the reader easily puts up with such a plot "shuffle" and curiously observes the transfer of characters to the future and their transformation, because this "informal" logic in the general narrative is justified, it looks like an artistic device of postmodernism, as a piquant originality of style.

The poetics of the writer directly depends on some details-

* In 1981, S. Rushdie won the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight's Children.

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ley: first of all, how he sees the surrounding reality, refracting it into the artistic world, what images he inhabits it with, how subtly he feels life, what emotions saturate the text - all these components make up the writer's style.

What is the specific nature of Rushdie's creative success? In his comprehensive erudition, artistic discernment, irony, satire, wit, metaphorical and aphoristic language. Here are the magnets that draw readers ' attention to this master. His poetics allows simultaneous use of all previous artistic methods and modern trends. Some of them need to be discussed, and I will start with critical realism. The impression of Rushdie's work would have been incomplete if the reader had not been introduced to the fragment about the converted Osman, formerly known as"the untouchable".

The episode, taken from the "Aisha" chapter of the Satanic Verses novel, takes place in the fictional country of "Peristan", but the village is called Titlipur. The writer constantly returns to Indian names, to Indian reality: "One young man (Aisha's employee - E. K.) was sitting not far from the entrance to the dwelling ... - as if he was Aisha's security guard, although she did not need protectors. He was formerly considered an out-of-caste untouchable from the nearby Hindu village of Chatnapatna, but after converting to Islam, he was given the name Osman...

The village of Titlipur grew under the shadow of a huge banyan tree - the only monarch who ruled with the help of numerous roots over an area of more than half a mile in diameter. And now the tree was so embedded in the village, and the village in the tree, that in such a close intertwining it was impossible to separate one from the other... When the panchayat of the village was going to meet, the elders sat on the most powerful branch of the banyan tree " ... 1

Sometimes the writer wonders if he has gone too deep into the "Indian banyan thicket". If the national flag of India required a symbolic representation of the country's flora, it could easily be a banyan tree, as in the flags of Lebanon - cedar, and Canada-maple leaf. However, Rushdie reminds the reader: "It was a Muslim village ... where Osman came hoping that the new Muslim name he had acquired would do him more good than the previous Hindu one. Mahatma Gandhi called the untouchables "God's children, "but as a" child of God "in Chatnapatna, Osman was not even allowed to draw water from a public well, because touching an out-of-caste one would pollute the drinking water." 2
Rushdie's criticism here is not of Islam, but of Hinduism. The image system, nature, social structure of society, it would seem that everything is from India, but it is, as in life on the Deccan Peninsula, tightly intertwined with everything Muslim, and you don't know how to say it in this case, from Pakistan or "Peristan", but the main thing is the vital truth-an island realism, which, as in other novels, was also found in the "Satanic Verses".

Rushdie has always gone his own way. The observant writer not only looked attentively at the surrounding life, but also studied it and went from "looking" to" seeing " at close range. This" short-sightedness " of S. Rushdie contributed to the successful transformation of the historical chronicle into a high-quality artistic text.

However, one cannot complain about Rushdie's historical "farsightedness", which the writer successfully copes with when he snatches episodes from the Caliphate, i.e., the VII-VIII centuries, not from modern laptops, but from dusty tablets. ("Satanic Verses"). Even in novels where the action takes place in a virtual world ("Grimus" or "Harun and the Sea of tales"), where fantasy freely hovers outside of time and space between heaven and earth, Rushdie is able to present the material in a fairy-tale and mythological genre without strain, so that the reader remains satisfied. We should also keep in mind this remarkable fact: Salman Rushdie is a polyglot, knows seven languages, is a person of three cultures and considers himself a "hybrid writer", and therefore he has many things available to him that others cannot comprehend. Readers should take into account such a given sent to him by fate and forgive some unusual ophthalmological oddity of the unique writer.

Do not forget about one more specific style of Salman Rushdie: he is a master of irony and humor, which are also one of the main pillars of his work. As an illustration, we can focus on a family sketch of a married couple Sufyan and Hind. How easily and skilfully the description of the two spouses is presented: "This Hind, so firmly established in the "exclamation fashion" ... was once a shy bride with a noble soul, the embodiment of good humor. The wife of an erudite schoolteacher named Sufyan in Dhaka accepted her duties with great eagerness, as an impeccable assistant who brought her husband cardamom - scented tea when he paused to check his essay books... on the novels of Bibhutibhushan Banerjee and the metaphysics of Tagore, in an effort to be worthy of a husband who could quote freely both the Rig Veda and ... the military reports of Julius Caesar, as well as the" revelations " of St. John. In those days, Hind admired his pluralism of opinions, openness of mind, and struggled on the culinary front, trying to draw her parallel to the scientific synthesis of her husband's eclectic knowledge of Indian cuisine: for example, her menu included both the preparation of "dosaza" - rice flour pancakes stuffed with vegetables-dishes of South India, and soft pumpkin balls of north Kashmir. Her husband gratefully understood the gastronomic pluralism that soon developed into a great passion. While the secularist Sufyan was swallowing tarot-

* Panch-translated from Hindi-five; panchayat - five leaders of the Hindu village community.

** Hindustan is sometimes referred to as the Deccan Peninsula, as almost all of Hindustan is occupied by the Deccan Plateau.

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Ronnie's culture of the subcontinent... and his wife baked and ate huge quantities of her own produce. As she devoured a variety of Hyderabad dishes and hot Lucknow yogurt sauces, her figure began to change, because the whole menu was about to take up residence, and she herself began to resemble a blurry, rounded mass: a subcontinent without borders, because food, as you know, passes through all the cordons. " 3
Here the knowledge of Indian psychology of both the husband - a history teacher, and the wife-a housewife with culinary skills is impeccable. Hind had lived up to the proverb "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach," but Rushdie had put a lot of irony into describing family relationships and Indian dishes laced with a heavy dose of humorous spice...

Against the background of personal dramas, political, religious and national problems are raised and revealed. Now the writer lives in the United States, but in his books he speaks critically and ironically about America and elite Americans. It is no coincidence that the Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul said: "A poet must always be in opposition to the authorities, otherwise he is dead."4. And Rushdie approves of this opinion.

S. Rushdie also captivates the reader with a kind of miracle language. For him, language is an instrument of art, which he knows perfectly. He does not just have a sense of words, but is engaged in lexical balancing, in which a scattering of jokes, ridicule, caricatures are born. Puns are a distinctive quality of his style.

One critic raved about Rushdie's work, asking rhetorically: "How many angels can dance on the edge of a pun?" And he answered it himself: "Probably a great many: how many hairs on the head." It's a pity that word juggling doesn't always translate perfectly, but a number of examples can be demonstrated.

In the novel" Satanic Verses " there is such an episode: Gibreel Farishta met Salahuddin Chamcha - a fan of the West, who is not indifferent to all English, and decided to change his name. Since the word" chamcha "means" spoon "in Urdu and" spoon "means" spoon "in English, Gibreel confidently told him:" If you are an English spoon, then please be Sally Spoono. " 5
Or one more phrase when it comes to the period of the "discovery of India":" We were not so much a subcontinent as a sub-right, that is, conquered because of the spices", and a few sentences that can serve as a kind of aphorism:"Where there is no faith, there is no blasphemy". "Sometimes legends are so real that they become more convincing than the facts of life." "Life must go on until it can't last any longer." "Don't expect anything, and you won't be disappointed."

The last phrase has the right to stand on the same step as the famous saying of Oscar Wilde:"Do not ask questions, and you will not be lied to."

Salman Rushdie drew much of his material for his novels from the reality around him, except for his line of phantasmagoria and " flights to the moon." Sometimes he chose friends, colleagues, acquaintances from real life as the prototypes of his characters, and often turned to himself. Alter ego ("the other me") is a favorite technique of the writer, and he used it in the novels "Children of Midnight", "Shame", "Satanic Verses", "The Last Breath of the Moor", "Rage", etc.

His characters, and sometimes heroes, are already in recent novels on a par with Indian European names, for example, in "The Last Breath of the Moor", "Rage", "Shalimar the Clown". Some critics sometimes refer to Rushdie as an English writer. But I do not agree with them, and I share the opinion of the Indian writer Shashi Tharoor, who in the Financial Times commented loftily about the writer's work: "Rushdie is still our most extravagant, inventive prose stylist, a writer whose originality is breathtaking." 6
PASSION FOR OUTRAGEOUS THINGS

Salman Rushdie is often unpredictable in describing things, objects, and phenomena that he has known and loved since childhood. We are talking about his beloved Bombay. For example, a writer who is already attuned to a certain mood suddenly offers only one phrase to the reader, which radically changes the former writer's loyal and affectionate attitude towards his native people

* Vidyadhar Suryaprasad Naipaul-Nobel Prize-winning writer of Indian origin.

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to the city: "Imagine, if you can, an exquisitely faithful ritual (Oh! and the matrimonial-obsessed) official society of the nineteenth-century English novelist Jane Austen, tied to the fetid, swarming London celebrated by Dickens, full of confusion and surprises, like a fish's belly full of squirming worms: combine everything and shake it up in a mix of ginger beer and araka, add fuchsia, vermilion, and vermilion for color sprinkle it all over with crooks and whores, and you'll get something that reminds me of my awesome hometown."7. Here is an unexpected turn in the assessment of the beloved Bombay in 2001 made by Salman Rushdie. Comments are unnecessary.

Individual episodes from the writer's novels are often grotesque in nature. Perhaps a good example from the novel "Shame" is the description of the family life of Reza Haidara's youngest daughter, Navid. Rushdie's work is generally characterized by satirical colors, which in this case thicken so much that they "reach the consistency" of shocking. Rushdie's startling theme for ridicule was childbearing in record time. Navid, who married athlete Talwar Ulhak, soon turned into a "super-young mother", which was also facilitated by her husband's unusual behavior. For confirmation, we will refer to the text: "A year later, General Reza Haidar became a grandfather. Daughter Navid gave birth to twins-boys. The general was so overjoyed that he even forgot that the true father of his daughter was his wife's lover, Sinbad Mengal. A year later, triplets were born, and a year later, four girls - nine grandchildren in three years: Begum Navid Talwar gave birth to children at the same time with a constant progression: five souls, then six: three boys and three girls. In short, when Haidar advised them to take precautions, Talvar was indignant at his father-in-law's recommendations, because his advice was godless. Soon he found himself the father of 27 children and already forgot how many daughters and how many sons he had. Talvar Ulhak loved children, and he figured out which nights were the most favorable for his wife to conceive. He visited his wife once a year and warned her to be ready, because it was time for sowing and she felt that her soil was ready to accept the seed. Begum Navid saw no escape, because she knew that if a woman is desired, then a man will overtake her everywhere and fill her. " 8
Of course, such superfantastics - for the amusement of readers, for fueling political intrigues-are quite natural for a literary text, and such a literary move can only be welcomed, but Rushdie also has other "pictures". Here, too, the vocabulary is already obscene and there is a sense of swagger in everything. S. Rushdie abuses the arguments about depraved relationships, which are just appropriate here, since they help to reveal a negative character: "Billy Batuta is a useless piece of shit. Pakistani playboy, focused ... holiday business "Travel Trampolines" on a fleet of supertankers. The coxswain of the flotilla, mostly known for his connections with Indian film stars, was rumored to prefer women with huge breasts and voluptuous bottoms, whom he worked hard to "treat" and pay tribute to. After all, what did Mimi want from bad Billy? His sexual tool... For playboys like Batuta, white women-whether they were fat or thin, Jewish or European - didn't matter to him, as long as they were meant only for copulation and then oblivion... What you hate in white, you love in brown "chocolate".. And when this one gets tired, the passion will rise to the "inverted" black. Blind adherence to the same type of women is not an indicator of a man's power. " 9
However, such a passage, or rather shocking, generously flavored with naturalism, clearly shows the writer's critical attitude towards his "fallen character" and thus convincingly debunks the maniac and degraded cynic.

WHO ARE YOU, MR. RUSHDIE: ATHEIST OR MUSLIM?

To understand a writer
need to know his biography.

Sainte Beuve

Salman Rushdie was born into a Muslim family. Despite this, he was and still is considered by some to be an "anti-Muslim". But why is he now talking about the reform of Islam?

Bombay, where he was born (administrative center of Maharashtra), - a concentration of many ethnic groups, dominated by Marathi and Hindustani. But fate sent Kashmiri parents to the writer. In addition, Maharashtra has many religions, but Hinduism is predominant in it. Thus, since childhood, Salman belonged to a minority - both national and religious.

His parents did not attach much importance to this, but still they did not encourage friendship with Muslims, and his son was sent to study first in an Indian English-language school, and after 14 years he was sent to England, where he continued his education at a London college. Salman later went to Cambridge University.

He wanted to learn about the history and philosophy of religions and, in particular, Islam. I carefully studied the Qur'an, its verses, then hadiths, but I could not agree with all the provisions of Sharia law. Even as a student, Salman began to doubt the absolute correctness of the laws of the Muslim Holy Book. This was the "first call", and from then on he nurtured the idea of writing a novel " Satanic Verses "and, finally, in 1988, completed his" fatal " work.

Throughout his life, S. Rushdie is beset by doubts, and hence ideological fluctuations arise. It is enough to compare the zigzags of his attitude to religion at different times according to his own confessions: "I was very religious in my youth, "he writes in Time magazine on February 27, 1989," but in the process of spiritual Westernization, I became disillusioned with Islam. Now I don't believe..." Exactly one year later, in February

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1990, in the Independent on Sunday, he states: "I have never believed in any god, and I still do not believe in any god," i.e. Rushdie confessed in these words that he is an atheist.

However, after this confession, Rushdie went "in a new circle": in 1991, he again took the oath of allegiance to Islam and promised not to consent to the republication of the Satanic Verses... the oath was not kept, and the scandalous novel was again published in a huge circulation.

What has he become now? A devout Muslim or a perjurer? It seems that the writer is a symbiosis of good and evil, and lives and creates with this complex. However, Rushdie constantly surprises people with his strange behavior and fantastic creativity. You can agree with it or, on the contrary, oppose it, but there can be no indifferent attitude towards it. He himself is not indifferent to life, he is always concerned not only about the events that are taking place, but also about the ancient laws that Muslim society still obeys.

S. Rushdie now offers to reform Islam and explains why: "The Islamic reformation is necessary not only to combat the ideologues of jihad, but also to combat the stifling atmosphere of traditional madrassas. We need to open the windows of closed communities wide to let in the fresh air they need." As for the Koran, "the writer suggests studying it not as a sacred one, but as a historical source, and taking into account that the laws laid down in the VII-VIII centuries should yield to the requirements of the XXI century." 10
S. Rushdie is concerned about many issues. Do all the rights recorded in the founding of a religion remain unchanged forever? What is the penalty for adultery (stoning a woman) or theft (cutting off a woman's hand)? What about Muslim inheritance law, which allows a widow to inherit only one-eighth of the estate, and sons to inherit twice as much as daughters? Why is a woman's testimony valued twice as much as a man's in Islamic jurisprudence? Why is there segregation of the female population in Muslim countries? Why do girls study separately from boys, and in schools and institutions, the preferences of the management team remain with men? Why do women have to wear a hijab when going out - a headscarf that hides their hair, as well as a dress that reaches to their feet, because the naked body should not be visible anywhere. Why do men still prefer to have sons in the family?.. In his book Cross the Line, Salman Rushdie writes openly about the" inhumane " situation of women and advocates for their emancipation.

However, there is no need to dissemble, and Rushdie fully agrees with at least one law of the seventh century: a Muslim has the right to marry more than once, i.e. he is allowed to have two, three, or four wives.

Rushdie completed it at the proposed rate. True, he did not simultaneously, but successively had four wives: an Englishwoman Clarissa Luard, an American Marguerite Wiggens, an Englishwoman Elizabeth West, and the last - an Indian Padma Lakshmi, with whom he also divorced in 2007.

In short, Salman Rushdie's life continues, and his works and ideas should be viewed critically, as a consequence of his own contradictions and the contrasts of his fate. But one thing is clear: he is a man of both the East and the West. Kipling's formula "West is West, East is East, and they will not leave their place" is outdated. In this context, they "got off the ground" and came together in one person - Salman Rushdie.

WHO CAN COMPARE TO RUSHDIE?

It would seem that such a non-standard writer, standing at a distance from everyone due to his specific features, cannot be easily compared with other "pen brothers". But in reality, it turned out just the opposite. Many critics who have drawn attention to Rushdie's work often draw parallels with other writers.

You can start with Milan Kundera, who, after reading Rushdie's Satanic Poems, immediately recalled Rabelais, whose books combine verisimilitude and fiction, allegory and satire. In the article "When the Playwright stops being funny", Kundera combines the beginnings of their novels in one of the first paragraphs: "Just as in the first pages of Rabelais' book Gargantua falls on the world stage from his mother's ear, in S. Rushdie's" Satanic Verses " two heroes fall out of a blown-up plane and fly down, chatting and singing songs and in general, they behave comically and completely unpredictably. " 11
Raising Rushdie to the Rabelaisian-Swift level, Kundera assures that sometimes he is even-

Milan Kundera is a well-known Czech writer, poet and playwright. In 1984, he gained popularity with the novel "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", which was successfully adapted into a film and brought the author even greater fame.

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ko hears notes of "pantagruelism". Rabelais ' novel has a bold freethinking, parodies of the surrounding society, and grotesqueness. Russian literary critic M. Bakhtin called "Gargantua" an example of"festive and carnival art". If Bakhtin had lived to see the publication of The Satanic Verses, he might have agreed with the opinion of the Syrian literary critic Sadiq al-Azm: "The carnivality of Rushdie's novel is obvious and serves good. The carnival of "Satanic Verses" is present in everything: actors, directors, masks, ceremonials, grotesques, metaphors, clowns, etc. The frankness of Rushdie's carnivalism is palpable in his thoughts and utterances about the past and future of Islam... "Satanic Verses" is a novel of high modernism, equal in level to the works of Brecht, Chaplin, Bonuel, Joyce, Baltman " 12.

The same expert on Rushdie's work made another interesting hypothesis. "If Nobel laureate Najib Mahfouz is an Arab Balzac, then I am inclined to think that Salman Rushdie is a Muslim James Joyce. It seems to me that the same cultural forces, historical processes, and social opposition that created the Arab Balzac probably made the Muslim Joyce possible. " 13
An interesting assessment of the novel is given by the Indian literary critic Majibuddin Said: "When Midnight's Children was first published, the novel was hailed as a work of fiction that required comparison with such diverse writers as Swift, Joyce, and Marquez, and with traditions of such diverse artistic methods as modernism, postmodernism, and the epic style of the Mahabharata and the Ramayans. While Midnight's Children achieved success in the West through partial mastery of modernist and postmodern techniques, in India itself it was helped by the ability to "tell strange myths in a relaxed manner."14
This characteristic of Eastern specialists, which we should agree with, gives reason to assert that Rushdie's work can be called "hybrid". If you take it seriously, then "hybridity", according to the Indian literary critic Mukherjee, is characteristic of most of the post-colonial literature of India in general.

Naturally, India has never lived in a vacuum, and new trends of Western European avant-garde movements, as well as the philosophy of existentialism and Freudianism, also penetrated the intellectual sphere, but few people remembered the nineteenth - century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Setting aside the extremes of his ideology, Rushdie was only interested in Nietzsche's attitude to religion and the problem of Good and Evil.

Almost all philosophers recognized the existence of evil behavior even in the kindest person and the possibility of developing virtue in the most notorious scoundrel. Kant also said: "And the evil one is not a devil, and the good one is not a saint." The dialectic of good and evil has long been expressed in the teachings of virtue as the "middle way" (Buddhism), the "golden mean" (Confucianism), and the "double behavior" (Taoism).

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche paid much attention to this problem, especially in his work Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche loved the commandment:"Do not create an idol for yourself." He counted: everyone must go their own way, otherwise they will not create their only life. He preferred to learn more from life than to teach life, to doubt more than to follow tradition. In this sense, his attitude to religion is characteristic, and Rushdie has some similarities with him in this regard.

Nietzsche believed that Christianity gave birth to the slave. As his opponent, Nietzsche called his teaching anti-Christian and himself Anti-Christ. "Be able to save yourself: this is the highest test of independence" - this is the main idea of Nietzschean teaching, and it is in tune with Rushdie, who throughout his work from one angle or another raised the problem of good and evil in his works and was critical of the Muslim religion, the morality of Sharia.

The writer knew Nietzsche's motto: "I am not a man, I am dynamite" 15, and has long taken a certain position and believes that Islam forms a dependent, non-independent consciousness, humility, and lack of freedom of a person. For Rushdie, religion became a symbol of dependent, "unhappy" consciousness (novels "Shame", "Satanic Verses").

There are different ways to disagree with religion. R. K. Narayan's gentle sneer at the holy fathers, his kind irony, is one thing, but Rushdie's caustic satire and "veiled" attacks on Islam are quite another. Judging by his contradictory statements, Rushdie's worldview can probably be considered anti-Muslim, and he himself, if not an anti-Muslim, then an atheist.

The prevailing opinion among people is that religion is almost the only moral savior of peoples (be it Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.), because it can give a person a genuine uplift of spirit, it is an effective means of mass moral education. Is this a condescending concern for the common man who, through religion, can become virtuous? On this subject, Nietzsche has his aphorism: "Virtue means to sit quietly in the swamp." This behavior is "not in the gut" S. Rushdie. He does not like the "stagnant swamp" in which he is offered to "sit". According to his temperament, he can not even sit in the forced "underground". Rushdie also liked another of Nietzsche's aphorisms: "One must have courage in the flesh to endure it, one must know no fear." 16 And Rushdie truly has courage and knows no fear.

Nietzsche lived under the motto Amor fati - "Love fate", that is, not only patiently endure the inevitable, but love it. Salman Rushdie is a frequent "paradox friend", and the result of his judgments is difficult to predict. Based on his life circumstances, he is not very grateful to fate, although he appreciates that the tragic sentence to death in one day made him a world celebrity. In his work, you can distinguish kri-

* Friedrich Nietzsche. Essays. Kaliningrad, 2005, pp. 410-411.

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There are critical moments in the mood of evil, tactlessness, cruelty, but at the same time you can find a good direction when he stands for the realization of human rights, for human dignity and the emancipation of women, when he raises his voice against exploitation, racism, violence.

Rushdie, of course, is contradictory, but let us recall the words of the Buddha himself: "And there was not, and will not be, and now there is no person who is worthy only of reproach or only praise." Sometimes the line between good and evil is blurred. To some extent, Rushdie can even be called a "beyond" moralist, who professes morality without edification, without absolute truths. He preferred freedom of speech, independence of judgment, and originality of thought to a ready-made truth for all time. Such people are often talked about: "Not a devil, not an angel, but a human being."

S. Rushdie's socio-political and at the same time fantastic novels are talented, original, and witty. They are interesting, relevant, and extravagant. The original humor and skill of the writer are more than variously appreciated by literary critics, religious ministers, political figures, and just readers.

Rushdie's" polyphonic " oeuvre is unique. Concentrated ideas are pressed into cross-cutting themes of good and evil, myth and reality, hybridity of cultures, synthesis and contradic-tion (contradiction) of East and West.

It is difficult to give a clear description of such a phenomenal person as Rushdie. Probably, readers felt that the trivial approach and template evaluations were inappropriate here. Rushdie's self-critical verses from Yevgeny Yevtushenko's Prologue might fit the bill:

I am different, I am overworked
and idle,
I am purposeful and impractical,
I am all incompatible,
uncomfortable,
Shy and arrogant, angry
and kind.
I love so much that everything
interspersed,
And so many things are
up in me
From the West to the East...17

RUSHDIE IS A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD, BUT... WHAT'S THAT?"

Salman Rushdie, an English-speaking Indian, was born and raised in India, spent his youth and mature years in the UK, and in the last seven years he chose to change the heat of Bombay and London smog to a more favorable climate in North America. From the writer's point of view, in this corner of the earth, emigrants have a special mood: they have faith in their own strength to realize their dream and experience freedom. This attitude is not a feeling, but a state of mind.

In the United States, S. Rushdie has experienced the comfort of freedom: no one is following him, no security guards are present in his house - "guests with machine guns", his books are sold, and no one throws them into the flames of auto-da-fe bonfires. He, a member of the Indian diaspora, was never called a "blackbird"*, and Salman never saw a "Wogs go home" poster anywhere. Moreover, no one called him a "white crow". On the contrary, he has earned the respect of the surrounding society for his tireless creative work. Thanks to this trust, Rushdie became the chairman of the PEN Club. His colleagues did not attach any importance to the fact that he was an Indian, that his native language was Urdu. They were not shocked by the concept of bilingualism - "bilingualism". If you are a pedant and turn to the history of our literature, then A. S. Pushkin himself, thanks to his noble upbringing, was bilingual from childhood and wrote poems not only in Russian, but also in French. Yes, and Dostoevsky talked about two homelands: Russia and Europe. And such Russian talents as Nabokov or Bunin - people who once left Russia or the Soviet Union, who lived or are living abroad-are the pride of our Russian culture.

When Mstislav Rostropovich was invited to the French Academy of Arts and awarded the title of Academician of France, the correspondent of" Paris-match " congratulated and said:

- You have become one hundred percent French.

"No, I'm Russian. Both by blood and soul, " was the reply.

However, Rostropovich added that his heart belongs to France, which sheltered him many years ago, but his family is the whole world. "My home is everywhere," he told 18.

M. Rostropovich and S. Rushdie can be called cosmopolitans, but not in the terrible sense of a traitor to the motherland, in which he was represented in the USSR in the 50s, putting this concept upside down, but in the meaning of "citizen of the world". This topic is discussed by our contemporary writer and scientist Nikolai Shmelev, now an academician, director of the Institute of Europe of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in his essay "I believe": "A cosmopolitan is a person who, first of all, tries to embrace the culture of the whole world. After all, the world's humanity has passed a centuries-old path, thinking, inventing, discovering, reaching true heights of spirit. How can you refuse this? On the contrary, we just need to live and work with an adjustment to the world's culture! I do not accept the opposition between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. If you like, it's the same thing, but cosmopolitanism is an enriched patriotism, so I would say. ...But I don't want to give up the gigantic riches that the world offers me. " 19
From this perspective, the work of the Indian writer Salman Rushdie is perceived quite differently. His novels cover not only Indian culture, but also the world's cultural heritage. Is there anything reprehensible in the fact that a Russian, English, American or Indian writer "conquers" the world for the motherland? And isn't the idea of a "world culture", a "single civilization", a "common home"still in the air? Great Indian artists also came up with a similar idea-

* This is the name of Indian emigrants in Europe, and the writer Anita Desai even has a novel "Goodbye, Blackbird", dedicated to this topic ("Bye, bye, Black Bird". L., 1971).

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nicknames - writers Rabindranath Tagore, Keshab Chandra Sen, Aurobindo Ghosh, Khoja Ahmad Abbas and others. Now famous Indians-philosopher Krishnamurti, writers Salman Rushdie, Raja Rao, Vikram Seth-all of them who have lived and are living abroad of their homeland India, are not only part of Indian culture and its inherent pride, but one of the components of world culture. Each of them can be attributed to the words of M. Rostropovich: "My home is everywhere" or the aphorism of Haabbas: "The world is my village", which gave the title to his novel.

Some Indian critics believe that S. Rushdie "went" too far to the West. However, this is not entirely true. After passing through Europe and the Atlantic, he found himself in the striped-star space of the United States. If you look at the globe, then America in relation to India across the Pacific Ocean will be, paradoxically, too far to the East. The conclusion is clear: Indian Salman Rushdie is a citizen of the world, and therefore he is a treasure of modern culture as a whole. This begs the question-after all, what kind of world?

A person's citizenship is an awareness of their rights and obligations to the country in which a person lives, but, on the other hand, the state must protect the rights granted to a person and fulfill the instructions established by law for its citizen.

Salman Rushdie's situation is much more complicated than that of the aforementioned writers. Hindustan is the Rushdie's native subcontinent, but its main states are: The Indian Republic and Pakistan do not even give the writer an entry visa to his native land, while European countries and America willingly take him under their patronage. Here is a paradox.

Rushdie failed to instill in his sons a love of India, the land of their ancestors: so the circumstances developed. His children are half - breeds from the Indian diaspora, do not live with him, but Rushdie does not lose touch with them and financially supports his heirs, who are very different. The eldest son, Zafar, by his first wife , is a grown man of thirty, and Milan, the youngest son by his third wife, is still a child of ten. Salman Rushdie spent the last few years in the United States with actress Padma Lakshmi, an Indian fashion model. This time, it wasn't him, but Padma's young fourth wife, who filed for divorce last summer and freed her husband from family ties.

Salman Rushdie, through his work and his life, has condemned himself to the position of a man who can be said to be " a friend among strangers and a stranger among his own." He is cursed in many Muslim countries after the publication of the "Satanic Verses", when Imam Khomeini was declared almost Satan and sentenced to death.

We will not judge by whose will, but Salman Rushdie became a world-famous person. He is the president of the PEN Center of the United States, winner of numerous literary awards and the most recent award - in June 2007, when Rushdie celebrated his 60th birthday, Queen Elizabeth II of England granted him the title of knight and the title of sir.

Salman Rushdie could be called a Citizen of the world, but with a clarifying question: "What world?" If you answer it in terms of civilizational worlds or interstate relations, then he is more likely an outcast than a citizen of the Muslim world and his Indian homeland. If we compare him to the Universe of global peace, then, judging by the noisy scandals that still cause his "Satanic poems" and public speeches, the world has clearly not yet risen to the level of civil tolerance in order to give God what is God's, Caesar what is Caesar's, and the writer praise or blasphemy, depending on what he wants. what he deserves. Rushdie is not alone here. You don't have to go far for an example.

One can recall an intriguing incident in the late 80s of the XX century with the Western director Martin Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ", in which Christians saw an insult to their religion. In the main cities of Europe, protest demonstrations were organized, fanatics demanded that the director be put on trial. As a result, Scorsese had "big trouble", but avoided jail time for putting his ideas on screen.

Rushdie's company could be made up of an equally famous American fellow writer Dan Brown with the novel "The Da Vinci Code", published in millions of copies in many countries, including in Russian translation in 2005 in Russia. He made a lot of noise, too. Dan Brown was also convicted of insulting religion and Christ himself, even to the point of being cursed by the Catholic Vatican. Like Rushdie's Satanic Verses, D. Brown's novel is being burned "at the stake of the twenty-first century inquisition." However, in Christian countries, the death sentence was still not discussed.

It is fair to admit that in the countries of the East and West, the disclosure of the "code of tolerance" and the understanding of artistic creativity that invades the "heavenly sphere" is still, apparently, far away.

1 Rushdie Salman. The Satanic Verses. London, 1989, p. 221 - 222.

2 Ibid., p. 222.

3 Ibid., p. 245 - 246.

4 Inostrannaya literatura Publ., 2001, No. 1.

Rushdie Salman. 5 Op. cit., p. 83.

6 См.: Supercover of Rushdie's novel "The Moor's Fast Sigh". N.Y., 1995.

Glushkova I. P. 7 From the Indian basket, Moscow, 2003, p. 127.

Rushdie Salman. 8 Shame. 1983, p. 206-207 (published in Pakistan, the place of publication is not specified, since the novel has become a prohibited work. - Author's note).

Rushdie Salman. 9 The Satanic Verses.., p. 260.

10 The newspaper "Where". 25.08 - 08.09.2005.

Kundera Milan. 11 When will Panurge stop being funny // Foreign Literature, 1994, N 7.

Al-Azm Sadik. 12 About Salman Rushdie // Die Welt des Islams. Damaskus, 1991, XXXI, p. 41 ("The World of Islam is the magazine of the Brill publishing house, which has been operating since 1683 in Leiden (the Netherlands). It is published twice a year in German, English and French. - Author's note).

13 Ibid., p. 9.

Said Madjibuddin. 14 Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Delhi, 2003, p. 149.

Nietzsche Friedrich. 15 Sochineniya [Works], Moscow, 2002, p. 420.

16 Ibid., p. 410.

Yevtushenko E. A. 17 Poems, Moscow, 1988, p. 16.

18 Literaturnaya gazeta, 1989, No. 42, p. 3.

Shmelev P. 19 I veryu [I believe] / / Literaturnaya Rossiya, 21.10.1990.

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