Буддийские аспекты образа барона Р. Ф. Унгерна фон Штернберга в повести "Песчаные всадники" Л. А. Юзефовича

Abstract

The article explores the Buddhist components of the image of Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg in the works of Leonid Yuzefovich. The analysis is carried out within the framework of the concept of the “Buddhist text” in modern Russian literature. The author of the article discovers and comprehends Buddhist ideas and motifs present in the story Horsemen of the Sands and the documentary novel The Autocrat of the Desert. Indirectly, the article also uses the essay “The Six-Armed God and His ‘Sons’ ” from Yuzefovich’s The Most Famous Impostors. The story and the novel were reprinted several times, and each time the writer made significant edits to them, which fixed significant changes in the image of the main character and reflected the writer’s deepening knowledge about Buddhism. The image of Baron Ungern in the story and in the novel is a complex and synthetic image, it combines the signs of a positive hero and of an infernal being, each of which is rooted in Buddhist metaphysics. The image of the baron as a character in Yuzefovich’s fiction correlates with the image of the real Roman Ungern von Sternberg. The real Baron Ungern looks no less exotic than his literary reflection. He is a participant in the White Movement, a religiously motivated warrior for the Buddhist faith, who comes into conflict with the West. He realizes himself inspired by Buddhist hierarchies and exists in the space of the approaching apocalypse. At the same time, in connection with the image of Baron Ungern in the story Horsemen of the Sands, the writer turns to the problems rooted in Buddhist philosophy, in particular, he raises questions of the illusory nature of being, karma and nonviolence. The image of horsemen of the sands fixed in the title of the story is a metaphor of time absorbing people and events, of the illusory space, of the unreliable human ontology, and of the unseemly vanity. Another idea of the story is the impossibility of avoiding the consequences of what has been done both at the level of the history of nations and of the fate of an individual due to karma, that is, the Buddhist law of created causes and matured consequences. The writer interprets both the appearance of Ungern in Mongolia and his passing away as a manifestation of bad karma. Finally, another important idea of the story is the idea of the essential discrepancy between the ethics of Buddhism and the idea of its violent, military propagation. The convergence of Buddhism and war in Horsemen of the Sands looks wrong and inappropriate, and leads people who have embarked on such a road to collapse at the level of their own destiny and to a historical defeat.