E. Y. KALINNIKOVA

Candidate of Philological Sciences

India Keywords:, literature. Raja Rao

On November 8, 1909, in the vicinity of Mysore (in southern India), in the village of Nassana, the future great writer Raja Rao was born into a noble Brahmin family. The first novel, Kantapura, written and published in French by the 20-year-old Raja, attracted the attention of the French classic Romain Rolland.

After graduating from the University of Madras, at the age of 19, Raja Rao left to continue his education in Europe. He first attended the University of Montpellier, in the south of France, and later the Sorbonne. The young brahmana accumulated knowledge and simultaneously tried to write in English and French. In 1930, after the publication of the novel "Kantapura" in Paris, Romain Rolland invited the author to visit. The 3rd year student intrigued the interlocutor and made a deep impression on him. After a conversation with the young writer, the master of French literature wrote in his diary: "On July 8, 1930, I was visited by a young Indian from Mysore, Raja Rao. He is full of vital energy and a desire to act. He intends to go to North Africa and preach the Ramakrishna mission there. " 1
Raja Rao also celebrated this momentous event in his life by publishing the article "Romain Rolland-a great wise man"in his homeland2. The intellectual kinship of two people from different continents was the basis of their mutual sympathy.

"KANTAPURA "

The novel "Kantapura" in English was published only in 1938 in London. The novel and the author were discussed in the literary community, and from the "eternal student" Raja Rao immediately turned into a famous writer.

Kantapura is the name of an Indian village, the life of which we learn from the mouth of a folk storyteller. Villages like Kantapura, nestled in the Himavatha River Valley like a child on its mother's lap, are not uncommon in southern India.

"The great Brahma, the creator god, was reclining among the clouds on a serpent when the arrival of the sage Valmiki was announced..." - so, in the traditional Indian style, alternating events of ancient history and modern times, telling about the gods, then about real people, the storyteller begins her story:

"- Rise up, god of gods! Sage Valmiki exclaimed. "I bring you bad news. Far below on earth, you have chosen Bharata (India - E. K.) as your chief daughter. You have given her the Himalayas beloved by the sages in the north and the seven stormy seas in the south, you have given her the Ganges for meditation, the Godavari for living, and the pure Kaveri for drinking (rivers of India are enumerated-E. K.). You have given her untold riches, gold, diamonds, and kings such as the world has never seen ... But Brahma ... You have long forgotten us, and from across the seas and oceans men have come to trample on our wisdom. They have come to bind us, to lash us, to destroy us. O Brahma, send us one of your gods, so that he may be reincarnated in an earthly form and restore the peace and abundance of your enslaved daughter.

"O sage," Brahma replied, " the very god Shiva ... reincarnate as a human and free my beloved daughter ... " 3

And so... born on earth in a Gujarati family, a son like no other man had ever seen before... You will remember how Krsna, when he was four years old, had already fought against the demons and killed the serpent Kali, and so our Mohandas** began to fight against the enemies of the country. As soon as he grew up, he started going to villages and educating people. More and more followers followed him, as if he were Krishna playing the flute. And he went from village to village to kill the foreign snake that ruled the land. "Fight," he instructed, " but don't hurt others, love everyone: Hindus, Muslims, Christians and untouchables, because all are equal before God. "4
In this context, it appears in the pages of the novel "the earth god" of the Indians - Gandhi. The bearer of his ideas is a young brahmana Murti. He calls for a boycott of English goods, brings spinning wheels from the city and, handing them to the residents of Kantapura, explains:"...Everything foreign makes us poor and corrupts us. You need to wear clothes made of yarn woven with your own hands. This is what is sacred. 5

Relying on his associates, he organizes a satyagraha in Kantapur, after which he is arrested. Murti is not just an adherent of Gandhian ideas, he is in a sense a symbol of the pervasiveness of these ideas.

Raja Rao surprisingly organically managed to subordinate the entire structure of the novel to the implementation of the main author's idea: Gandhi is the source of light, and those who carry his ideas to the people are rays that penetrate into the most remote, dark corners. The writer wove together the idea of a patriotic upsurge that engulfed

Ramakrishna (real name - Gada Dhar Chatterjee, 1836-1886) - Indian mystic philosopher and religious reformer, representative of neo-Hinduism. He preached the "universal religion", considering that such concrete historical forms of religious worship as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity are separate manifestations of the universal aspiration to the one divine principle (editor's note).
** Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)-leader and ideologue of the National Liberation Movement of India.

*** Satyagraha-civil disobedience movement (author's note).
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the whole country, with the mystical idea of the all-pervading essence of the deity, of the divine truth, with which he identifies the teachings of Gandhi.

Paying tribute to tradition, the author of "Kantapura" skillfully introduced into the artistic chronicle of events mythological elements that are well known to the Indian reader.

This is why Raja Rao's novel is sometimes referred to as the Gandhian Puranas, and Srinivas Ayyangar, the foremost scholar of ancient Indian literature, has called it "the tale of Gandhi, a tale that is a poetic translation of a reality that will always be central to Gandhian literature." 6
Deep connection with national traditions, successful discoveries in the field of form, high artistic skill of the young writer-all this ensured the colossal success of the novel "Kantapura". In 1963, when the novel was reprinted again, Raja Rao was awarded the prize of the Literary Academy of India for his work.

"SNAKE AND ROPE "

Raja Rao spent the Second World War in India. He plunged headlong into the life of his country. While reestablishing temporarily severed ties with the Hindu world, he zealously followed the precepts of his caste and meditated on eternal substances. The religious bias in Raja Rao's worldview intensified as his spiritual crisis deepened, creating a general atmosphere of depression among the Indian intelligentsia, who were experiencing a period of collapse of their ideals and hopes after India's independence.

Depressed and disillusioned, Raja Rao once again returned to Europe and sought to apply his spiritual powers on a slightly different plane. From there, in 1950, he went to America for the first time on a cultural training mission. Raja Rao as a professor of Eastern theosophy and philosophy, an expert on Buddhism and Hinduism, begins to play perhaps the main role in saturating the New World with Eastern wisdom of the Indian model. At the same time, he does not forget his writing work.

In 1960, his novel The Serpent and the Rope was published, which has been called the best novel not only in English-language literature, but in general in all Indian literature by such authoritative literary critics as Prabhakar Machwe, K. D. Narasimhaiya and E. M. Forster.

"If Kantapura is Raja Rao's Ramayana," Sh compares. Ayyangar, then "The Snake and the Rope" is his " Mahabharata* * * "7. Here we are not talking about the volume, but about the number of problems raised and the depth of their philosophical understanding. "The Snake and the Rope" is a work about the complex interaction of cultures and religions of the East and West, full of religious and philosophical symbols, and requires some preparation of the reader.

The time of action of this novel, which is largely autobiographical, 1949-1954. The prototype of the heroine - Madeleine-is the first wife of Raja Rao-French Camille Mouly, a history teacher. Location-India, France, England.

In the center of the novel is a young scholar - historian Ramaswami, or simply Rama, on whose behalf the story is being told. The son of a professor, he was already able to read books in Kannada, his native language, and Sanskrit at the age of four, and as a teenager he mastered English and French. When Rama turns 22, he is sent to France to study European history. The subject of his research is " The Heresy of the Cathars and Albigenses." Rama is handsome, intelligent, loves poetry and freely quotes poems by Baudelaire, Valerie, Rilke, Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman. At the university, he meets the ancient history teacher Madeleine Rousselin and falls in love with her.

Rama is five years younger than Madeleine, but neither the age difference, nor religious and national differences do not stop young people who decide to marry. However, marriage does not bring them happiness. Their first child dies in infancy, the second is stillborn. Soon, Rama's father is killed in India, and his stepmother and four sisters and brothers are taken into his care. To top it all off, Rama, who has tuberculosis, worsens the process in the lungs. Heroes do not survive the trials that have befallen them. The union, which lasted only a few years, is collapsing. Madeleine retreats to religion. Rama leaves for India.

This is briefly the plot of the novel, on the basis of which the writer poses a number of very complex problems. One of them is the problem of marriage between a Hindu and a Christian woman, which should be understood much more broadly - as a problem of compatibility of the spiritual world of the East and the West. At first, Rama thinks that he can find himself only with the help of a woman who is completely revealed to him, both spiritually and physically. "Her hair is like gold, and her skin is like unearthly marble, from which we build winter castles, cool palaces with a lake and a peacock walking in the garden... Madeleine was like a palace in the moonlight. There is such a luminous mystery - the deeper you go into it, the more you will know yourself. " 8 This is how Rama sees Madeleine.

The young couple, who profess different religions, perceived many things differently in their lives, and at first they made mutual compromises, trying to understand each other's spiritual world. Madeleine's interest in Hinduism provoked a response from Rama. He began to strenuously study Christian teaching, to which he was encouraged, among other things, by the work of Dostoevsky that impressed him.

However, the spiritual rapprochement of people from different worlds, according to Raja Rao, is illusory. Madeleine is the first to feel the unnatural nature of her union with Rama. "Your amazing approach to everything was strange to me," she wrote to him afterwards. "You're so unusual yourself. I loved you for that. When I held you, you smelled like mountain air, pine needles. Your heart was like a mountain stream, its tenderness so transparent. I loved swimming in it. But how cruel it can be ... You are people,

* The Puranas (from skt. purana, literally-ancient) - monuments of ancient Indian literature; sacred books of Hinduism (author's note)
** Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic poem written in Sanskrit. It is attributed to the legendary poet Valmiki, II century AD. author's note).
* * * "Mahabharata" - an epic of the peoples of India (modern times). the view was acquired by c. 1 thousand AD), the authorship is attributed to Vyasa, consists of 18 books (author's note).
* * * * Sects that existed in the south of France in the XII-XIII centuries. author's note).

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receptive to the invisible, and we to the visible. For me, you - the invisible one-became so concrete, became my husband" (p. 39).

The first blow falls on Madeleine when their first son, who was called Krishna for six months, and then Pierre, dies. Yielding to Rama, she consents to the child's corpse being burned. However, later the Catholic Madeleine begins to be tormented by what she has done. The thought that the baby had not been given a Christian burial added to her misery.

Rama, on the other hand, treated the death of his son calmly, "like a morning mist", as something natural and inevitable. Hinduism has taught us from childhood to see death as a logical continuation of life: the perishable is united with the imperishable, with nature, with that which does not disappear, and in the eternal cycle it regains life. "So sad is our river, so sad is our land," thinks Rama, " but the greenness of the trees and the whiteness of the mountains are proof that Truth is possible... Truth - the Himalayas, the Ganges, humanity. That's why we throw the ashes of the deceased into the river. It carries it to the sea, and the sun warms the water, vapors form clouds that return to the Himalayas. The cycle of death and birth is eternal, like snow and rivers " (p. 37).

Over time, the illusions of Rama were dispelled. Although he calls the Rhone River Ranga's sister, however, "Madeleine's realm" did not become his world. Even the climate of France was disastrous for him, making his illness worse. The crowning chord of nostalgia is Rama's mental monologue: "India is not like France or England. India is an eternal idea... Wherever I go, I bring India with me. Let me not see the Ganges, let me not immerse myself in it, let me not bathe in it. But the Ganges has always been and remains my Truth... the beginning and end of my brahmanism. I must return to India, to the Ganges, to the glued deer, to the shrill cry of the elephant breaking the majestic silence of the groves... India is my breath, my only love, gentle and wise. She is my mother... "(p. 380-381).

Even before his marriage, Rama knew in his heart of hearts that he could only have a true union with a Hindu woman, because marriage should be based on blood and spiritual unity. The psychologism of the novel becomes even more profound when another woman, this time a Hindu, enters Rama's life.

Rama met Savitri in India when he was going to bury his father. She is a modern educated woman who graduated from the University of Cambridge. Their acquaintance does not end, since she also lives in Europe. Rama analyzes his attitude towards her. On the one hand, they seemed to differ in everything: she was a Northerner, he was a Southerner; she loved London, he loved Paris; she could talk politics, he loved religion; she was friends with communists, he with apolitical intellectuals. In general, Rama did not like "such Northerners who immediately plunged into ultramodernity out of seclusion" (p. 34).

But on the other hand, Rama liked Savitri because she was a Hindu. His thick Oriental brows, his knowledge of Indian customs, his ability to read Sanskrit, his Agra jewels, the smell of rose oil from Lucknow - all made Rama feel like he was in India. Rama's mental associations are also characteristic when he thinks of Savitri: "She has become the consciousness of my consciousness, the measure of my perception. I lost the world, and she became it. What I gave her, she accepted, like the Ganges that takes in the waters of the Himalayas, running down to the sea and turning again into white snowflakes, then blue, green, and when the sun rose, the snow melted again, and the Ganges once again took the waters and drove them to the sea - so we gave love for each other... "(p. 171-172).

The inner struggle in the soul of the hero, who loves Madeleine, but who is attracted to Savitri, is revealed by the author very skillfully and subtly. Every time he talks to Madeleine, he has to explain something to her, but Savitri understands him right away. Madeleine for him is purity and nobility, holiness itself, and Savitri is the motherland, it is faith. "Savitri was not in me, but as me," says Rama. "She's not like someone far away, unreal... but as an unquenchable light-not knowing where to shine... "(p. 244). The description of Rama's feelings is presented in the novel so naturally and psychologically justified that the reader begins to share its duality.

Rama's search for happiness has not been successful, and he is determined to return to India to finally find enlightenment. He believes that his guru will guide him on the right path and heal him spiritually and physically.

As you can see, the character of Rama in the novel "The Snake and the Rope" is revealed not in dynamics, but by analyzing his inner world. The reader gets to know the hero as the hero gets to know himself. Much the same is true of Madeleine.

Madeleine goes to pray at the Black Madonna Buddha Temple. She is considered a saint: she heals the sick, predicts people's fate, feeds birds with her hands. In the last pages of the novel, we see Madeleine already a nun. She is devoted to asceticism, vegetarianism, reading sacred texts, prayers, and meditation.

It is interesting that at the end of the novel, Raja Rao again fixes the reader's attention on the problem: is the spirituality of the East and the West compatible? The following dialogue takes place between Rama and Madeleine, who has already renounced worldly life and the Christian religion:

"What separates us, Rama?

- India.

- India... But I'm a Buddhist...

- You can become a Buddhist just like you can become a Christian or a Muslim.

"So what?"

"But no one can accept Hinduism.

"You mean you can only be born a brahmana?"

- Yes, this is a purely Hindu feature " (p. 336).

In drawing Madeleine's spiritual transformation, Raja Rao clearly drew on the eclectic religious and philosophical doctrines of Western theosophical societies, which included elements of Christianity, Hinduism, and especially Buddhism.

The withdrawal of the individual from society into his inner world is a theme typical of modern modernism. However, it is unlikely that the novel itself can be called a modernist work, and Madeleine is a modernist heroine. The fact is that Madeleine's self-withdrawal from the hustle and bustle of the earth is dictated not by fear of life, but by the search for truth, in the name of love for people. A deeply religious person who came to religion after severe mental and physical suffering, Madeleine evokes direct associations with Dostoevsky's characters.

The influence of the Russian classic on the Indian writer was manifested not only in the exposure of the "underground"

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the human soul, but also in the philosophical orientation of the disputes that the characters of the novel lead. Raja Rao brings two friends of Rama to the pages of the novel: the Russian intellectual George, a Latin teacher, and the Spanish emigrant Lezo - Basque, a Sanskrit teacher. One-armed George, a member of the French Resistance, is described with a special feeling of sympathy. "He came to us," Rama describes his friend, " with all the Slavic simplicity and seriousness that makes contacts with Russians so enriching "(p. 66). The reader often witnesses the discussions of friends who argue about Buddhism, Christianity, and Dostoevsky.

The most ardent debater and defender of religion was George, through whose mouth Raja Rao expounds Dostoevsky's religious ideas: "God exists because evil exists" - George's favorite thesis. "To kill a God is to kill a man at the same time... Neither God leaves man, nor man disappears in God, but remains until the end, until the end of time. This is how Dostoevsky shows Christianity-more by feeling than by words " (p. 74).

Unfortunately, Raja Rao's approach to Dostoevsky was one-sided. In all the rich creativity of the latter, saturated with humanism and democratic ideas, Raja Rao saw only a religious facet 9.

The novel "The Snake and the Rope" is full of symbols. Take the name itself. The rope, which at first glance can easily be mistaken for a snake, is a traditional example used in ancient Indian philosophical teachings to prove the illusory nature of the visible world.

The symbolism of the image for the Indian reader is so transparent here that it does not need any comments. The untrained, i.e. European, reader is another matter. Therefore, Raja Rao throughout the story strives to decipher this symbol as fully and exhaustively as possible.

"Is the world real or unreal, a rope or a snake? - the hero of the novel argues. "You could step on a snake and convince yourself: "No, no, it's a rope," and stand on the snake... The guru brings you a lantern; it lights up the long white road. "You see, it's just a rope," the guru says, and shows it to you. You feel the rope and realize that it has never been a snake... "(p. 340).

A chain of symbols encircles the entire text of the novel, all the arguments of the hero. "This is Ramaswami," Savitri explains, " he works with symbols and equations. History for him is a boundless algebra, and he constantly plunges into the unknown to explain them... "(p. 184-185).

The desire for encryption has defined the style of both the work and the language, which is replete with a kind of aphorisms. Here are some of them:: "Life is a pilgrimage, but only where?" (p. 28), "A bad son can be born, a bad mother can never" (p. 35), "Sound is a product of silence" (p. 170), "You can't avoid the flow of time, but you can avoid yourself" (p .198).

If Raja Rao began his creative career with the theme of the national liberation movement, which is characteristic of the advanced Indian literature of the XX century, and his first novel "Kantapura" conveys the intensity of the struggle of the Indian people in the late 20s and early 30s, then in the 50s Raja Rao retreated from socio-political problems and delves into the inner world of a person, analyzing the spiritual and spiritual.

In 1965, the writer marries actress Catherine Jones, but the marriage ends in divorce, although Raja Rao has a long-awaited son Christopher. In 1986, he marries a new muse, Susan Waugh, who also gives the writer a son. He successfully combines the duties of an "ever-young" husband with lectures on Buddhism at the University of Texas and active creative work.

His novel "The Snake and the Rope" clearly demonstrates that the writer remains true to the Hindu principles of worldview,and that they determine his worldview positions. However, this did not prevent Raja Rao from absorbing - and quite deeply - the experience of Western modernist literature, many of its artistic techniques. There is nothing surprising in the fact that for Indians, the name of Raja Rao is primarily associated with "Kantapura", while for Europeans it is associated with "Snake and Rope" and the published experimental book" The Cat and Shakespeare "("The Cat and Shakespeare", 1965), which is even more difficult to understand. understanding. This explains the fact that the Literary Academy of India awarded Raja Rao its prize for the patriotic "Kantapura", and not for "Snake and Rope". Back in 1969, the Indian government awarded him the Padma Bhushan for his services to the Motherland, both as a diplomatic worker and as a talented artist, along with R. K. Narayan and Mulk Raj Anand, who together with him belong to the great three of English-language Indian literature.

In 1988, he received the prestigious Neustadt International Prize for Literary Creativity. In addition to those mentioned, Peru p. Rao also owns the following works: "The Cow on the Barricades and other Stories" ("The Cow of the Barricades, and other Stories", 1947)," Comrade Kirillov "("Comrade Kirillov", 197610)," The Policeman and the Rose "("The Policeman and the Rose", 1978), "The Chessmaster and his Moves" (1988), "The Great Indian Way: A Life of Mahatma Gandhi" (1998), and many others.

According to Rao: "India is not a nation like France, Italy, Germany, India is a way of life. Wherever I go, I take my India with me. " 11

Raja Rao died on July 9, 2006 at the age of 96 from a heart attack in Austin, Texas.

Dayal D.P. 1 Raja Rao and Romen Rollan // The Literary Criterion. 1987, N 3, v. XXII, p. 65.

Raja Rao. 2 Romain Rolland, the Great Sage // Jaya Karnataka. Dharwar, India, 1933.

3 Here and further quoted edition: Raja Rao. Kanthapura. New York, 1963, p. V.

4 Ibid., p. 11 - 12.

5 Ibid., p. 33.

6 Srinivasa Iyengar. Indian Writing in English. Bombay, 1962, p. 312.

7 Ibidem.

Raja Rao. 8 The Serpent and the Rope. London, 1960, p. 15.

9 On the influence of F. M. Dostoevsky on the work of Raja Rao, see: Kalinnikova E. Ya. Raja Rao and Dostoevsky - in: Immutability and Novelty of the Artistic World. (Ed. by N. I. Prigarin). Moscow, IV RAS, 1999, pp. 257-272.

10 See: Kalinikova Elena. Russian - Indian Literature connection: A Comparative Analysis of two Novels: "The Possesed" and "Comrade Kirillov" // New Perspectives in Indian Literature in English. New Delhi, 1996, p. 137 - 147.

11 Raja Rao passes away // The Hindu, July 2006, p. 3.

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