Baron Ungern in the Literature of the 1920s: The Two-Sided Optics of the Civil War

Abstract

The article analyzes the image of Baron R. Ungern von Sternberg, which was created in the 1920s by writers, who were standing on different sides during the Civil war. In the works of A. Nesmelov and P. Krasnov, adherents of “white idea&8j1;, it is romanticized and apologized. Nesmelov in “Ballada about Daurian Baron&8j1; (1927) embeds him in the Daurian and Mongolian myths. The negative qualities in this person, when touched by mysteriousness, somehow gain in attractiveness. Krasnov in the novel “For the Thistle&8j1; (1922) turns Baron Ungern into the savior of the Fatherland and the Romanov dynasty; his hero is a Eurasian in outlook, who came into contact with Buddhism, with Asia, and it was there that he found a new support for the revival of Russian statehood; his image in the novel reflects martial righteousness and Tibetan mysticism. Soviet writer S. Markov in his novel “Red Buddha” (1929, publ. 1989), in turn, ornaments the image of Ungern, focusing on the diversity of Asian reality that captured and transformed the baron: Ungern is terrible, he is an enemy of Soviet power, but he is not worldly, zoomorphic and ornithomorphic features appear in his image. Markov’s Ungern is like a fake Buddhist, the baron took from Buddhism an exotically perceived mysticism and filtered Buddhist ethics in his own interests. Despite the difference in ideological views, these writers, creating the image of Baron Ungern, speak less about politics. At the center of their works is, first of all, his religious choice – a Westerner who converted to Buddhism.