Poetic Thanatology of the Novel by E.M. Remarque "Life on Loan or Heaven Knows no Favorites"

Pokhalenkov Oleg Evgen'evich Doctor of Philology Professor, Department of Literature, Kaluga State University named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky 248002, Russia, Kaluzhskaya oblast', g. Kaluga, ul. Nikolo-Kozinskaya, 56, kv. 8 olegpokhalenkov@rambler.ru Other publications by this author

Nikulicheva Sof'ya Evgen'evna Student, Department of Literature, Kaluga State University named after K. E. Tsiolkovsky 248023, Russia, Kaluzhskaya oblast', g. Kaluga, ul. Stepana Razina, 26 nikulichevase@studklg.ru Other publications by this author

For many centuries, the influence of the historical process on the literary process has been noticeable in culture. Their close relationship gave rise to new themes and motives for literary works. This process was especially vividly reflected in the literature of the XX century. L.A. Trubina in the article "The dialogue of literature with history in the evaluation of modern literary criticism" notes: "Researchers of the literary process of the XX–XXI centuries often talk about the "historical renaissance", about the "pressure" and even the "dictate of history" in literature" [8:430].

Two world wars, the collapse of empires, revolutions were not only imprinted in the texts of writers, they gave rise to new authors who wanted to tell the whole world about what they went through. This is how the writers of the "lost generation" appeared. Sh.A. Olimova writes about their aesthetics: "The period following the First World War is known for its protest against traditional ethical and moral values, social and cultural conventions, aesthetic rules and regulations of the past. Decadence, indifference and aimlessness are the distinctive features of the literature created during this period" ^[4]. Among them was the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, who became famous thanks to his novel "On the Western Front without Change" (1928) and whose work never ceases to attract the attention of researchers (see podr.: ^{[6,7,11,12,13]}). Analyzing this work, M.I. Sverdlov notes: "This is not a war of the Germans against the French and the British, this is a war of Life with Death. From now on, Death threatens not only an individual, millions of individuals – it threatens the whole of humanity" [9:123-124]. It is noteworthy that the researcher singles out Death as a separate and even central character of the novel, without which the plot can not be tied. Death is becoming commonplace for a person of the twentieth century, those who survived and balanced on the brink of life and death could not but devote their works to it.

The science of death – thanatology – studies "the state of the organism in the final stage of the pathological process, the dynamics and mechanisms of dying, the immediate causes of death, clinical, biochemical and morphological manifestations of the gradual cessation of vital activity of the organism" ^[5], originates in medicine. The definition of literary thanatology, having undergone a number of metamorphoses described by R.L. Krasilnikov in his monograph ^[1], has become broader: "the concept of "thanatology" has come to mean not only the scientific discipline itself, but also the object of its study" [1:14]. Thanatology with all connotations, metaphors, images, mythologems of death works at all levels of the novel: ideological-thematic, plot, character, space-time and genre.

For Remarque, death is a natural, everyday category that the existence of characters is soaped with. The established course of things is perceived by them as natural and the only correct one. For the work of the writer of the "lost generation", such a trend of the early twentieth century as the denial of death was not characteristic. Krasilnikov writes that the reverse picture is observed in the thanatology of the previous century: "The fifth stage, called "inverted death" by Aries, is characteristic of the XX century, when society displaces death from the collective consciousness, behaves as if it does not exist" [1: 37]. In Remarque's novels, on the contrary, she surrounds everything and penetrates everything. This can be judged by the fact that thanatology is in close contact with all the poetical levels of Remarque's novels. If the meaning of death, which is common to all of his work, was already mentioned earlier, now we will take a closer look at each of the levels of a literary work.

In Remarque's novel "Life on Loan, or Heaven Knows No Favorites" (1959), the theme of death is fundamental. This is already evident from the title of the work: the word "heaven" has many connotations, in this case we are talking about providence. It is unknown who it will choose, who will live and who will die. The whole story set out in the novel is the characters' path to their death. They are playing with death, putting themselves at risk. Lilian Dunker, who has a fatal diagnosis, escapes from the hospital together with a racing driver who has already met death more than once. To some extent, their lifestyle can be considered suicide. Lillian has a special attitude to death, it is very contradictory: "Are you afraid of death? ... I ask myself this question so often that I forget how much it sometimes scares others" ^[8]. She herself is afraid of death, although she struggles with this fear: "A beautiful woman. Why is she so worried about nothing? ... It always happens in a sanatorium when someone dies... because the dead takes away a part of yourself. Some kind of hope. Her friend died" ^[8].

Lillian is preparing herself for death, she is obsessed with the idea of her imminent end, all her reasoning boils down to only one thing – death: "I know I'm going to die," she thought.  And I know it better than you, that's what it's all about, that's why what seems to you just a chaotic jumble of sounds is crying, screaming, and rejoicing for me; that's why I perceive what is everyday life for you as happiness, as a gift of fate" ^[8]. Lillian keenly feels injustice towards her, others live, and she must die: "They all strive either for adventure, or for business, or to fill the void in themselves with the noise of jazz. She is chasing life, only life, she is madly hunting for it, as if life is a white deer or a fabulous unicorn" ^[8]. At the same time, she treats death as something deeply personal, belonging only to her, and she is proud of her position: "I have no future. Nothing. You can't imagine how much it makes things easier."^[8] And she accepts Clerfay into her world only because he looks like her. They are both connected by the fact that they have neglected life and are ready for death: "How similar we are," she thought. – Both have no future! His future is only until the next race, mine is until the next throat bleed." She smiled."^[8] Life for Lillian is death, these are closely intertwined concepts, in her mind one is often replaced by another. She wants to live because she's going to die. If she didn't know that she was going to die and would die soon, she wouldn't have lived the way she lives – fully: "What do I know about life? Destruction, flight from Belgium, tears, fear, death of parents, hunger, and then illness due to hunger and flight" ^[8]. All she knows about life is that she will have to die. The topic of almost every conversation with Clerfay becomes death. He returned from the war, where the reality is not life, but death. And he himself had already tried on the role of a dead man more than once, he was already dying: "Dressed in the clothes of a dead man, I lay hidden by the river for several hours waiting for night," he said. – I still felt terrible disgust; but suddenly I realized that the clothes I wore as a soldier probably also belonged to the dead... after three years of war, there weren't many new uniforms... and then I began to reflect on the fact that almost everything we own was given to us by the dead... our language and our knowledge, the ability to feel happy and the ability to despair. And so, putting on a dead man's dress to come back to life again, I realized that everything in which we consider ourselves superior to animals – our happiness, more personal and more multifaceted, our deeper knowledge and more cruel soul, our capacity for compassion and even our idea of God – all this is bought at one price: we have learned what, according to people, is inaccessible to animals, we have learned the inevitability of death. It was a strange night. I didn't want to think about running away, so as not to lose heart, I thought about death, and this brought me comfort."^[8] Almost all of Clerfay's friends are dead, so the boundaries between the world of the dead and the world of the living are blurred for him. "To try on a dead man's dress" means to die. To live, you have to die. Consequently, real life, for Clerfay, begins only after death, because all those who died are more important and more alive than those who remained alive: "people much better than you had to die" ^[8].

The inhabitants of the world of the dead are much more active than the current people, existing only at the expense of those who no longer live in the real world surrounding it. Perhaps that is why he manages to get into the world of the dead, to the sanatorium of the Dalai Lama (we will talk about the spaces of the novel later). And so Lillian reached out to him, she felt that he was experiencing what was coming to her and what she was so afraid of. Clerfay has no fear of death, he has developed his own philosophy of attitude to it: "Breathe deeply, admire the mountains, thank God for your salvation and think that people much better than you had to die" ^[8].

The first chapters of the novel, the described space of which is a sanatorium, are more like a collection of stories with an unhappy ending, in which the characters died, died, and those who did not die will die later, because they are seriously ill. Russian Russian patient and Spanish artist, who loved the same girl, but she preferred Russian and Russian, such are the stories about Rainier and Richter, who never saw each other, but played chess for several years, betraying moves on pieces of paper, and when one of them died, the nurse still continued to pass the pieces of paper; about the Russian patient and the Spanish artist, who loved the same girl, but she preferred Russian and then the artist set himself the goal of surviving the Russian and getting a girl, and in the end she died; about Manuela, whose parents came to her funeral, and she turned out to be alive, and about their undisguised disorder and her death; about Agnes Sommerville – a young girl who died in a few hours and whose death begins the story about Lillian.

In the sanatorium, death is a cult that doctors and nurses serve, and people are sacrificed. It is easy to recognize the features associated with the afterlife in the reader's mind, which draws its signs not only from Christian, but also from ancient Greek, Indian mythology. The author uses a common cultural language, through which the sanatorium is described as an unreal world – the space of the dead. So, the sanatorium is endowed with the following features of the afterlife. Firstly, it is located in the mountains. The mountain zone is the border between heaven and earth, a kind of purgatory. The heroes of the text call part of the sanatorium: "Yes. We're having dinner downstairs tonight. In purgatory ... Purgatory is our lower hall" ^[8]. Secondly, the dead guests are cremated. The cremation process is described in the text rather eerily: "Tonight, secretly from everyone, the coffin will be lowered down and taken to the crematorium on a sleigh. There, suddenly engulfed by the heat of the flame, he will light up, the fiery hair, scattering sparks with a crack, will flare up again, now for the last time, the stiffened body in the furnace will rise, even rise slightly, as if reviving anew, and will disintegrate into nothing..." ^[8]. Burning after physical death resembles resurrection into a new life, which is traditional for Christian culture. But according to Dante, purgatory still refers to an afterlife, a deadly space. Cremation of bodies in the novel is a transition from purgatory to the world of the dead. Thus, at the spatial level in the novel, there is a zone belonging to Thanatos. We wrote about this in an article about the female images of the novel ^[2]: "Getting into this special world, a person goes through the stages of transition into this world not only physically, but also spiritually. That is, he begins to associate himself with the world of the sanatorium. Volkov and Lilian left to return and eventually die in the same place. Clerfay and Holman left to die in the end on the highway during a car race, and everyone who has ever got into the mountain world, into the kingdom of the Dalai Lama, is not a tenant." A strange pattern revealed by us connects all the heroes who visited the sanatorium with the fact that everyone who was in the mountains either died or stayed to serve. The opposite of the tremulous, painful perception of the end of human life, the author cites another. For example, the story of a corpse carrier to the crematorium, who took flowers thrown to the corpses and sold them in his shop. The practical view of death as an opportunity to earn money is the view of cynics, people of the twentieth century who have abstracted from the thought of the end of life: "They live as if they intend to live forever. They stick out in their offices and bend their backs at their desks. One might think that each of them is Methuselah doubly. That's their whole sad secret. They live as if death doesn't exist. And at the same time they behave not like heroes, but like merchants! They chase away the idea of the transience of life, they hide their heads like ostriches, pretending that they have the secret of immortality. Even the most decrepit old men are trying to deceive each other by multiplying what has long turned them into slaves – money and power" ^[8]. Thirdly, the Bella Vista sanatorium is a closed space: not everyone can get into it and for this you need to go to the initiation stage. We wrote about this in previous works: "The Clerfay road to the sanatorium is also of interest ... there was a transition and such steps as meeting with a mythical creature were observed, and twice overcoming the test" ^[8]. Yu.S. Obidina in the article "The world of the dead as a reflection of the world of the living in ancient Greek society of the archaic and classical era" writes about the algorithm of transition to the world the dead: "The routes to Hades are also different ... Hades is also surrounded by water, which is sometimes described as the sea (Ocean), and sometimes as rivers. The most famous of them was the River Styx... upon arrival in Hades, the soul will only be able to enter the realm of the dead when the body is buried. The entrance to Hades was eventually reduced to a gate guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, who makes sure that no one can leave the underworld."^[3] In the text we find an indirect comparison of the sanatorium with the Styx: "The world of the sanatorium is a planet of the past left behind forever, and there was no return to it, as it is impossible to cross the Styx twice" ^[8]. And the workers of the sanatorium, its servants, as mentioned earlier, are referred to in the text as cerberus, the mythical guards of Hades: "once you are in the hospital, these cerberus of healthcare begin to treat you with a kind of angelic patience ..." ^[8].

At the character level, the relationship of thanatology with the image of the central female character is interesting. Lillian's escape from the sanatorium with Clerfay is an attempt to avoid her death at the expense of his life. Lillian's goal was originally to get someone else's life –the life of Clerfay, to take it away from him, to live it for him. She took his life, this is the idea of the novel, which is carried out in the title. She borrowed something that she was not going to repay, because her very purpose was to become the cause of death, to become death. At the moment of the heroes' transition from the mountain world to the earthly Clerf, it was revealed that he was taking a man belonging to Thanatos out of the sanatorium: "Clerf slowed down – it was necessary to turn around. And out of the corner of his eye, in the tightness of the tarpaulin–covered cabin, under the thoughtfully rustling babble of the rain, in the greenish half-light of the instrument panel, he glanced at Lillian-and was taken aback. He had never seen her like this before. Her face, caught out of the darkness by the flicker of a speedometer, a clock and other devices designed to measure time, distance, speed, for a moment. For one heartbeat, in contrast to all this measuring technique, it seemed to him as if he had completely fallen out of time –like death itself, he suddenly thought, death, with which this person started a race." All the devices measuring the physical categories of earthly life, which work only in reality, but are not applicable to the otherworldly world, contrast sharply with the girl's face. It belongs to this world, it belongs to death, it is a part of the whole. We also wrote about the image of the heroine in early works: "In Remarque's novel, Lillian Dunker is also compared to death, to a dead woman, to a ghost. For example, in the episode of Lillian's farewell to Agnes Sommerville ... Then the footman takes Lillian for the dead Agnes ... Lillian is compared to death and she calls herself this way: "no, nothing itself lurks in this box, that terrible and absolutely incomprehensible that, arising together with every life, lives and grows up together in an ominous dumbness with her, carrying the eternal hunger of death, an irresistible craving for self–destruction, Lillian Dunkirk lives in her, silently growing, shortening her life day and night, devouring another day, and another, until she devours everything to the last minute, and then only a lifeless shell remains of her, which that's how they will be stuffed into a black box, the last abode of decay and decomposition"" ^[8].

Back in the sanatorium, she takes over the baton of the deceased Agnes, but she does not die like her friend. Lillian tries to outplay death and takes her place. The purpose of death is to take life ("shortening its life span"), but at the same time death itself lives and progresses along with the development of the human body ("arising together with every life <...> lives and grows up with it"; "silently growing"). She is personified in Lillian's mind, embodied in some abstract entity. And at the moment of saying goodbye to Agnes, she recognizes death within herself ("lives in her, in Lilian Dunker") and lets in a formless essence, gives her a form for the time she will live an earthly life ("and then only a lifeless shell will remain of her"). In the mind of Clerfay, the image of Lillian is compared with the evil spirit: "And when Lillian is in her room, two wings will suddenly grow behind her and she will fly out into the street; she will fly not to the chapel of Saint-Chapelle, which she was talking about today, but straight into Walpurgis night, sitting on a very elegant broomstick – Balenciaga or Dior products. All the devils will be there in tailcoats..." ^[8]. Even a hero who is in love with Lillian cannot perceive her as a bright being, as a winged angel. Clerfay penetrates her insides and he sees her as a witch on a broom, flying to the sabbath on a magical night. Thus, in Lillian Dunker, couples are concentrated, referring us to the image of the other world with all the attributes associated with it. Since the other world is traditionally the world of the dead, the allotment of death, then the unit of the common whole is itself.

The novel begins with a description of the arrival of Lilian Dunker into the world of the living, into the earthly world, and ends with her death. The plot of the work is also subordinated to the theme of death, and it is the leitmotif of the novel. In the understanding of the characters, death is the end, it is the conceivable limit of existence. This can be judged by the gradation in judgments, the highest point of which is precisely the earthly demise: "Really, in order to understand something, a person needs to survive a catastrophe, pain, poverty, the proximity of death?!" ^[8]; "With memories of war, devastation, flight and death" ^[8]; "The inevitable has already become a part of her, just as the order to attack already contains a soldier's uniform, and the upcoming battle, and perhaps even death" ^[8]. This is the traditional perception of a person's end. Remarque does not neglect the idea of death fixed in the mass consciousness, but he also gives an alternative view of the afterlife.