Rosa's name
Umberto Eco
Rosa's name

The Notes of Father Adson from Melk fell into the hands of the future translator and publisher in Prague in 1968. On the title page of the French book of the middle of the last century, it appears that it is a transcription from the Latin text of the 17th century, allegedly reproducing, in turn, the manuscript , created by a German monk at the end of the XIV century. Investigations undertaken in relation to the author of the French translation, the Latin original, as well as the personality of Adson himself do not bring results. Subsequently, the strange one (perhaps a fake that exists in a single copy) disappears from the publisher's field of vision, adding one more link to the unreliable chain of retellings of this medieval story.

In his declining years, the Benedictine monk Adson recalls the events he witnessed and participated in in 1327. Europe is shaken by political and ecclesiastical strife. Emperor Louis confronts Pope John XXII. At the same time, the pope is fighting the monastic order of the Franciscans, in which the reform movement of non-acquisitive spiritualists, who had previously been severely persecuted by the papal curia, prevailed. The Franciscans team up with the emperor and become a significant force in the political game.

In this turmoil, Adson, then still a young novice, accompanies the English Franciscan William of Baskerville on a journey through the cities and largest monasteries of Italy. Wilhelm is a thinker and theologian, a tester of nature, famous for his powerful analytical mind, a friend of William of Ockham and a student of Roger Bacon - performs the task of the emperor to prepare and hold a preliminary meeting between the imperial delegation of the Franciscans and representatives of the curia. Wilhelm and Adson arrive at the abbey where it is to take place a few days before the arrival of the embassies. The meeting should take the form of a debate about the poverty of Christ and the church; its goal is to find out the positions of the parties and the possibility of a future visit of the Franciscan general to the papal throne in Avignon.

Having not yet entered the monastery, Wilhelm surprises the monks, who went out in search of a runaway horse, with accurate deductive conclusions. And the rector of the abbey immediately turns to him with a request to investigate the strange death that happened in the monastery. The body of the young monk Adelma was found at the bottom of the cliff, perhaps he was thrown out of the tower of a tall building hanging over the abyss, called Khramina here. The abbot hints that he knows the true circumstances of the death of Adelmo, but he is bound by a secret confession, and therefore the truth must come from other, unsealed lips.

Wilhelm receives permission to interrogate all the monks without exception and examine any premises of the monastery - except for the famous monastery library. The largest in the Christian world, capable of being compared with the semi-legendary libraries of the infidels, it is located on the top floor of the Temple; only the librarian and his assistant have access to it, only they know the layout of the storehouse, built like a labyrinth, and the system for arranging books on the shelves. Other monks: copyists, rubricators, translators, who flock here from all over Europe, work with books in the copying room - the scriptorium. The librarian alone decides when and how to provide the book to the one who claimed it, and whether to provide it at all, because there are many pagan and heretical works here. In the scriptorium, Wilhelm and Adson meet the librarian Malachi, his assistant Berengar, the translator from Greek, Venantius, an adherent of Aristotle, and the young rhetorician Bentius. The late Adelm, a skilled draftsman, decorated the margins of his manuscripts with fantastic miniatures. As soon as the monks laugh, looking at them, the blind brother Jorge appears in the scriptorium with a reproach that laughter and idle talk are indecent in the monastery. This man, glorious for years, righteousness and learning, lives with a sense of the onset of the last times and in anticipation of the imminent appearance of the Antichrist. Looking around the abbey, Wilhelm comes to the conclusion that Adelm, most likely, was not killed, but committed suicide by throwing himself down from the monastery wall, and the body was later transferred to Khramina by a landslide.

But on the same night, in a barrel of fresh blood from slaughtered pigs, the corpse of Venantius was found. Wilhelm, studying the traces, determines that the monk was killed somewhere else, most likely in Khramina, and thrown into a barrel already dead. But meanwhile, there are no wounds on the body, nor any injuries or signs of a struggle.

Noticing that Benzius is more excited than others, and Berengar is frankly frightened, Wilhelm immediately interrogates both. Berengar admits that he saw Adelm on the night of his death: the face of the draftsman was like the face of a dead man, and Adelm said that he was cursed and doomed to eternal torment, which he described to the shocked interlocutor very convincingly. Benzius also reports that two days before the death of Adelmos, a dispute took place in the scriptorium about the admissibility of the ridiculous in the image of the divine and that holy truths are better represented in gross bodies than in noble ones. In the heat of the argument, Berengar inadvertently let slip, albeit very vaguely, about something carefully hidden in the library. The mention of this was associated with the word "Africa", and in the catalog, among the designations understandable only to the librarian, Bencius saw the visa "the limit of Africa", but when, intrigued, he asked for a book with this visa, Malachi declared that all these books were lost. Benzius also tells about what he witnessed, following Berengar after the dispute. Wilhelm receives confirmation of the version of Adelm's suicide: apparently, in exchange for a certain service that could be associated with Berengar's abilities as an assistant librarian, the latter persuaded the draftsman to Sodom sin, the severity of which Adelm, however, could not bear and hurried to confess to the blind Jorge, but instead absolution received a formidable promise of imminent and terrible punishment. The consciousness of the local monks is too excited, on the one hand, by a painful desire for book knowledge, on the other hand, by the constantly terrifying memory of the devil and hell, and this often makes them literally see with their own eyes something that they read or hear about. Adelm considers himself already in hell and in desperation decides to take his own life.

Wilhelm is trying to inspect the manuscripts and books on the Venantius table in the scriptorium. But first Jorge, then Benzius, under various pretexts, distract him. Wilhelm asks Malachi to put someone at the table on guard, and at night, together with Adson, he returns here through the discovered underground passage, which the librarian uses after he locks the doors of the Temple from the inside in the evening. Among the papers of Venantius, they find a parchment with incomprehensible extracts and signs of cryptography, but there is no book on the table that Wilhelm saw here during the day. Someone with a careless sound betrays his presence in the scriptorium. Wilhelm rushes in pursuit and suddenly a book that fell from the fugitive falls into the light of a lantern, but the unknown person manages to grab it before Wilhelm and hide.

At night, the library is stronger than locks and prohibitions guarded by fear. Many monks believe that terrible creatures and the souls of dead librarians roam among the books in the darkness. Wilhelm is skeptical of such superstitions and does not miss the opportunity to study the vault, where Adson experiences the effects of illusion-creating distorting mirrors and a lamp impregnated with a vision-inducing compound. The labyrinth turns out to be more difficult than Wilhelm thought, and only by chance do they manage to find a way out. From the alarmed abbot, they learn about the disappearance of Berengar.

The dead assistant librarian is found only a day later in a bathhouse located next to the monastery hospital. The herbalist and healer Severin draws Wilhelm's attention that there are traces of some substance on Berengar's fingers. The herbalist says that he saw the same at Venantius, when the corpse was washed from the blood. In addition, Berengar turned black - apparently, the monk was poisoned before he choked in the water. Severin says that once upon a time he kept an extremely poisonous potion, the properties of which he himself did not know, and then it disappeared under strange circumstances. The poison was known to Malachi, the abbot and Berengar. Meanwhile, embassies are coming to the monastery. Inquisitor Bernard Guy arrives with the papal delegation. Wilhelm does not hide his dislike for him personally and his methods. Bernard announces that from now on he himself will be investigating incidents in the monastery, which, in his opinion, smell strongly of the devil.

Wilhelm and Adson infiltrate the library again to plan the maze. It turns out that the storage rooms are marked with letters, from which, if you go through in a certain order, conditional words and names of countries are made up. The "limit of Africa" ​​is also discovered - a disguised and tightly closed room, but they do not find a way to enter it. Bernard Guy arrested and accused of witchcraft an assistant doctor and a village girl, whom he brings at night to appease his patron's lust for the remains of the monastery meals; On the eve, Adson also met her and could not resist the temptation. Now the fate of the girl is decided - as a witch she will go to the fire.

The fraternal discussion between the Franciscans and the representatives of the pope turns into a vulgar fight, during which Severin informs Wilhelm, who has remained aloof from the battle, that he has found a strange book in his laboratory. Their conversation is heard by the blind Jorge, but Bencius also guesses that Severin has discovered something left from Berengar. The dispute, which was resumed after a general reconciliation, is interrupted by the news that the herbalist was found dead in the hospital and the killer has already been captured.

The herbalist's skull was smashed in by a metal celestial globe that stood on the laboratory table. Wilhelm searches Severin's fingers for traces of the same substance that Berengar and Venantius have, but the herbalist's hands are covered with leather gloves used when working with dangerous drugs. The cellarer Remigius was caught at the scene of the crime, who tries in vain to justify himself and declares that he came to the hospital when Severin was already dead. Benzius tells Wilhelm that he ran in here one of the first, then followed the incoming and is sure: Malachi was already here, waiting in a niche behind the canopy, and then imperceptibly mixed with other monks. William is convinced that big book no one could sneak out of here and if the killer is Malachi, she must still be in the lab. Wilhelm and Adson embark on a search, but overlook the fact that sometimes ancient manuscripts were intertwined several in one volume. As a result, the book remains unnoticed by them among others that belonged to Severin, and ends up with the more perceptive Bentius.

Bernard Guy conducts a trial of the cellar and, having convicted him of belonging once to one of the heretical movements, forces him to accept the blame for the murders in the abbey. The inquisitor is not interested in who actually killed the monks, but he seeks to prove that the former heretic, now declared a murderer, shared the views of the spiritual Franciscans. This allows you to disrupt the meeting, which, apparently, was the purpose for which he was sent here by the pope.

To Wilhelm's demand to give the book, Benzius replies that, without even starting to read, he returned it to Malachi, from whom he received an offer to take the vacant position of an assistant librarian. A few hours later, during a church service, Malachi dies in convulsions, his tongue is black and on his fingers the marks already familiar to Wilhelm.

The abbot announces to William that the Franciscan has not lived up to his expectations and the next morning he must leave the monastery with Adson. Wilhelm objects that he has known for a long time about the sodomy monks, the settling of accounts between which the abbot considered the cause of the crimes. However, this is not the real reason: those who are aware of the existence of the “limit of Africa” in the library are dying. The abbot cannot hide the fact that William's words led him to some kind of conjecture, but he insists all the more firmly on the departure of the Englishman; now he intends to take matters into his own hands and under his own responsibility.

But Wilhelm is not going to retreat, because he came close to the decision. At a random prompt from Adson, he manages to read in the cryptography of Venantius the key that opens the "limit of Africa." On the sixth night of their stay at the abbey, they enter the secret room of the library. Blind Jorge is waiting for them inside.

Wilhelm expected to meet him here. The very omissions of the monks, entries in the library catalog and some facts allowed him to find out that Jorge was once a librarian, and feeling that he was going blind, first taught his first successor, then Malachi. Neither one nor the other could work without his help and did not step a step without asking him. The abbot was also dependent on him, because he got his place with his help. For forty years the blind man has been the sovereign master of the monastery. And he believed that some of the library's manuscripts should forever remain hidden from anyone's eyes. When, through the fault of Berengar, one of them - perhaps the most important - left these walls, Jorge made every effort to bring her back. This book is the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, which is considered lost and is dedicated to laughter and the ridiculous in art, rhetoric, and the skill of persuasion. In order to keep its existence a secret, Jorge commits a crime without hesitation, for he is convinced that if laughter is sanctified by the authority of Aristotle, the entire established medieval hierarchy of values ​​will collapse, and the culture nurtured in monasteries remote from the world, the culture of the chosen and initiated, will swept away by urban, grassroots, areal.

Jorge admits that he understood from the very beginning that sooner or later Wilhelm would discover the truth, and he watched the Englishman approach it step by step. He hands Wilhelm a book, for the desire to see which five people have already paid with their lives, and offers to read it. But the Franciscan says that he figured out this diabolical trick of his, and restores the course of events. Many years ago, having heard someone in the scriptorium showing interest in the "limit of Africa", the still sighted Jorge steals poison from Severin, but does not immediately let him into action. But when Berengar, out of boasting before Adelmo, once behaved unrestrainedly, the already blind old man goes upstairs and soaks the pages of the book with poison. Adelm, who agreed to a shameful sin in order to touch the secret, did not use the information obtained at such a price, but, seized with mortal horror after confession from Jorge, tells Venantius about everything. Venantius reaches the book, but he has to wet his fingers on his tongue to separate the soft parchment sheets. He dies before he can get out of the Temple. Berengar finds the body and, fearing that the investigation will inevitably reveal what was between him and Adelmo, he transfers the corpse to a barrel of blood. However, he, too, became interested in the book, which he snatched almost out of Wilhelm's hands in the scriptorium. He brings her to the hospital, where he can read at night without fear of being seen by anyone. And when the poison begins to act, he rushes into the pool in the vain hope that the water will extinguish the flame that devours him from the inside. So the book gets to Severin. The sent Jorge Malachi kills the herbalist, but he himself dies, wishing to know what such a forbidden thing is contained in the object, because of which he was made a murderer. The last in this row is the abbot. After a conversation with Wilhelm, he demanded an explanation from Jorge, moreover: he demanded to open the “limit of Africa” and put an end to the secrecy established in the library by the blind man and his predecessors. Now he is suffocating in the stone sack of yet another underground passage to the library, where Jorge locked him up and then broke the mechanisms that controlled the doors.

“So the dead died in vain,” says Wilhelm: now the book has been found, and he managed to protect himself from the poison of Jorge. But in fulfillment of his plan, the elder is ready to accept death himself. Jorge tears up the book and eats the poisoned pages, and when Wilhelm tries to stop him, he runs, unerringly navigating the library from memory. The lamp in the hands of the pursuers still gives them some advantage. However, the overtaken blind man manages to take away the lamp and throw it aside. Spilled oil starts a fire; Wilhelm and Adson rush to fetch water, but return too late. The efforts of all the brethren raised in alarm lead to nothing; the fire breaks out and spreads from Khramina first to the church, then to the rest of the buildings.

Before the eyes of Adson, the richest monastery turns into ashes. The abbey burns for three days. By the end of the third day, the monks, having collected what little they managed to save, leave the smoking ruins as a place cursed by God.

One of the very unusual and interesting books falls into the hands of one translator. This book was called "Notes of Father Andson from Melk". They fell into the hands of that man exactly in Prague in 1968. On the book, on the most important page, the title page, it was written that this book was translated into French from Latin.

This text seemed to confirm that the book was translated from a manuscript, which was very valuable, since it was written in the seventeenth century. Also, this manuscript was written by a monk at the end of the fourteenth century. The person in whose hands these manuscripts fell began to search for everything about the identity of this monk, as well as Adson himself. But, alas, these searches yielded nothing, since there was almost no information. Then this book disappeared from sight, because it seemed to be a fake, which, perhaps, was the only one of its kind.

The manuscript actually talks about Adson. who was a monk. He recalls various events that he once witnessed, so long ago. It was 1327. In Europe, events are taking place that are very turbulent, as kings and emperors oppose each other, using their power. Also, as always, the church interferes in this matter, and its power is simply unlimited, which is sometimes very dangerous. King Louis is trying to confront the emperor John the twelfth himself.

Adson was still very young then, he was a novice. He then accompanied the thinker and theologian through the cities and large monasteries on his journey. Adson soon gets acquainted with Wilhelm, who is also about his age, he is also a novice. That is why their missions coincide. They travel together, together they do what they are constantly instructed to do. And they are always near famous people, from whom they receive important and not too important tasks. That is why they see well the history of their days, which they will read later, even without their participation.

One day an incident occurred that shocked many people, as well as the novices themselves, Wilhelm, and also Adson, because a fire broke out, which mainly affected the abbey. And it all happened because Jorge, an old man who got one mysterious book, decided to die himself so that no one would know the secret.

Picture or drawing Umberto Eco - The name of the rose

Other retellings and reviews for the reader's diary

• Summary of Leskov The Sealed Angel

  During bad weather, many travelers take refuge in the inn. The house is stuffy, hot, sleep is bad. One of the guests notices that the man is being led by an angel, just like him once. Travelers are asked to tell this story.

• Summary of Turgenev on the Eve

  It all starts with a conversation between two friends. Andrei Bersenev yearns in the face of Nature, and Pyotr Shubin rejoices in life, advises to believe in Love. Without this feeling in the outside world everything is cold

• Pikul

  Pikul came from a simple peasant family. When he was born the family lived in Leningrad. And it happened on July 13, 1928. His grandmother was engaged in his upbringing, thanks to which he fell in love with reading. At school, he loved drawing and acrobatics.

• Summary Centurion Viper

  The boy Borya got on the train. His grandmother accompanied him. She asked me to send a message when she arrives! Borya entered the car. It was a boy (twelve years old) with rosy cheeks, slender build. The places were occupied.

• Summary of The Misanthrope of Molière

  The main character Alceste reproaches his friend Filinta for his friendliness to an almost unfamiliar person. Straightforward by nature, he does not want to communicate with people who are too polite with all outsiders.

A Benedictine monk named Adson recalls the events in which he unwittingly became a participant when he was still very young. At that time, he was still a novice and, together with the Franciscan monk from England, William of Baskerville, traveled around Italy.

It seemed that Wilhelm was driven only by a passion for the truth. Arriving at the abbey, he amazed those around him by the fact that a horse had escaped from their stable. Never having seen him, he was able to accurately describe him and even said his name. He told young Adson that he learned all the information only by comparing the facts.

the day before

In the abbey they found the body of a young monk, a skilled draftsman, Adelmo Otraisky. The abbot asked Wilhelm to investigate this crime - he had no doubt that the young monk had been killed. During the investigation, Wilhelm came to the conclusion that Adelm had committed suicide. The author takes the reader around the abbey, introduces the most striking of its inhabitants. The ugly-looking Salvator spoke in a mixture of languages, composing from the wreckage different languages your own. The teachings of Elder Ubertino laid the foundation for the development of the spiritual movement. The herbalist Severin from Sant'Emmerano was in charge of the hospital, the garden, and the baths. Berengar of Arundel was assistant librarian to Malachy of Guildestheim. The blind old man Jorge from Burgos considered laughter to be a manifestation of the devil, and Venantius of Salvemec objected to him.

A sense of mystery, innuendo filled every moment while Wilhelm and Adson were in the abbey. And most of all it was felt in the library, access to which was only for the librarian and his assistant. Something was hiding here, and it was connected with the word "Africa". In the catalog of books, Benzius once saw the "limit of Africa", but when he tried to find out what it was, it turned out that the book had long been lost.

In the early morning, the body of Venantius was discovered. There was no doubt that he had been killed. Wilhelm had to investigate already two mysterious deaths. Benzius testified that Berengar was consumed by a passion for Adelmo. Soon Berengar himself disappeared, his body was found only a day later. Severin pointed to the poison marks on his fingers and tongue.

Embassies arrived at the abbey, and with the delegation of the pope came the inquisitor Bernard Guy, who took charge of investigating what was happening in the monastery. During a discussion between the papal delegation and the Franciscans, which escalated into a fight, Severin informed William that he had found something that was left of Berengar. However, it was not possible to find out the details - the body of the herbalist was soon found with a fractured skull. The cellarer Remigius, who was caught in the laboratory, was accused of the crime.

Severin found some book, which, after his death, fell into the hands of Benzius. He, without even beginning to read it, gave it to Malachi, who offered Bencius to take the place of his assistant. During the church service, the librarian died, and traces of some kind of poison were found on his fingers, his tongue turned black.

The abbot asked William and Adson to leave the monastery. However, the Englishman explained that the crimes were obviously connected with the secret room - the "limit of Africa", and he was not going to retreat. At night, Wilhelm and Adson entered the secret room and saw the blind Jorge there. It turned out that a long time ago he was a librarian, but, discovering that he was going blind, he taught Malachi. The librarian and the abbot were completely dependent on him. Jorge was sure that some books from the library should disappear forever. Berengar took away the second part of Aristotle's Poetics, which was devoted to laughter and the ridiculous in rhetoric and art. Jorge was sure that the discovery of this book would destroy established values. A long time ago, he stole poison from Severin, and now he used it, poisoning the book. Berengar told Adelmo about the book, he told Venantius. The latter began to read the book, but wet his fingers with his tongue and died. Berengar, fearing that he would be accused of a crime, threw the body of Venantius into a barrel. He himself went to the hospital and began to read. When the poison began to act, he rushed into the bath. In the hospital, Severin found the book, but he was killed by Malachi, who himself soon died after touching the book.

The abbot guessed about the role of Jorge in the crimes, demanded that he stop secrets and open the "limit of Africa." But the blind man left him in one of the underground passages, and the abbot was destined to die.

Jorge tore the book in front of Wilhelm and ate its pages. The oil that spilled from the lamp started a fire. For three days the monastery burned to the ground.

Umberto Eco

Notes in the margins of "The Name of the Rose"

title and meaning

Rosa que al prado, encarnada, te ostentas presuntuosa de grana y carmin banada:

campa lozana y gustosa; pero no, que siendo hermosa tambien seras desdichada.

Juana Ines de la Cruz

After the release of The Name of the Rose, I receive letters from readers asking me to explain the meaning of the final Latin hexameter and its connection with the title of the book. I answer: the quote is taken from the poem "De contemptu mundi" by the Benedictine Bernard of Morlan (XII century). He develops the theme "ubi sunt" (whence later Villon's "oh sont les neiges d'antan"). But Bernard added one more thought to the traditional topos (great men, magnificent cities, beautiful princesses - everything will turn into nothing): that empty names remain from the disappeared things. I remind you that Abelard used the example of "nulla rosa est" to prove that language is capable of describing both disappeared and non-existent things. I invite readers to draw their own conclusions.

The author does not have to interpret his work. Or he shouldn't have written a novel, which by definition is an interpretation machine. This attitude, however, is contradicted by the fact that the novel requires a title.

The title, unfortunately, is already the key to interpretation. Perception is given by the words "Red and Black" or "War and Peace". The most tactful, in relation to the reader, titles are those that are reduced to the name of the eponymous hero. For example, "David Copperfield" or "Robinson Crusoe". But also a reference to the name of an eponym can be a variant of imposing the author's will. The title "Father Goriot" focuses readers' attention on the figure of the old man, although Rastignac or Vautrin-Colin are no less important for the novel. Probably better such honest dishonesty, like Dumas. It is at least clear there that The Three Musketeers is actually about four. Rare luxury. The authors allow themselves this, it seems, only by mistake.

My book had a different working title, Crime Abbey. I rejected him. It set readers on a detective story and would confuse those who are only interested in intrigue. These people would buy the novel and be bitterly disappointed. My dream was to call the novel Adson from Melk. The most neutral title, since Adson, as a narrator, stands apart from other heroes. But our publishing houses do not like proper names. They even remade Fermo and Lucia. We have very few titles based on eponyms, such as Lemmonio Boreo, Rubet, Metello. Very few, especially compared to the millions of cousins ​​Bette, Barry Lyndon, Armance, and Tom Jones who populate the rest of literature.

The title "The Name of the Rose" arose almost by accident and suited me, because the rose as a symbolic figure is so full of meanings that it has almost no meaning: the rose is mystical, and the tender rose lived no longer than the rose, the war of the Scarlet and White roses, the rose is a rose there is a rose there is a rose, Rosicrucians, a rose smells like a rose, call it a rose or not, rosa fresca aulentissima. The title, as intended, confuses the reader. He cannot prefer any one interpretation. Even if he gets to the implied nominalist interpretations of the last sentence, he will still come to it only at the very end, having had time to make a lot of other assumptions. The name should confuse thoughts, not discipline them.

Nothing pleases the writer so much as new readings, which he did not think about and which arise in the reader. While I was writing theoretical papers, my attitude towards reviewers was of a protocol nature: did they understand or did they not understand what I wanted to say? With romance, it's different. I am not saying that some readings cannot seem erroneous to the author. But still he must remain silent. Anyway. Let them refute something else, with the text in their hands. Most often, critics find such semantic shades that the author did not think about. But what does "not think" mean?

One French researcher, Mireille Cal-Gruber, compared the use of the word "semplici" in the sense of "simple, poor people" with the use of "semplici" in the sense of "medicinal herbs" and came to the conclusion that "tares of heresy" are meant. I can answer that the noun "semplici" in both cases is borrowed from the contexts of the era - as well as the expression "tares of heresy." Of course, I am well aware of Greimas' example of the double isotopy that occurs when a herbalist is called "amico dei semplici" - "friend of the simple." Consciously or unconsciously did I play on this ambiguity? Now it doesn't matter. The text is in front of you and generates its own meanings.

Reading the reviews, I shuddered with joy to see that some critics (the first were Ginevra Bompiani and Lars Gustafson) noted Wilhelm's phrase at the end of the Inquisitional Court scene (p. 388 ital. ed.): "What is the most terrible thing for you about purification?" Adson asks. And Wilhelm replies: "Hurry." I really liked, and still like, these two lines. But a reader pointed out to me that on the next page, Bernard Guy, frightening the cellar with torture, declares: “The justice of God is not hasty, no matter what the false apostles say. God's justice has many centuries at its disposal." The reader quite rightly asked: how, according to my plan, are Wilhelm's fear of haste and the emphasized slowness proclaimed by Bernard connected? And I discovered that something unplanned had happened. There was no overlap between the words of Bernard and Wilhelm in the manuscript. I had already included Adson's and Wilhelm's remarks in the layout: for reasons of concinnitatis, I wanted to add one more rhythmic block to the text before Bernard entered again. And, of course, when I forced Wilhelm to hate haste (from the bottom of my heart - that's why I like the line so much), I completely forgot that immediately after that Bernard speaks about haste. If you take Bernard's remark without regard to Wilhelm's words, this remark is just a stereotype. Exactly what we expect from a judge. Approximately the same as the words "For justice, all are one." However, in relation to Wilhelm's words, Bernard's words have a completely different meaning, and the reader is right when he wonders if these two are talking about the same thing, or whether Wilhelm's aversion to haste is not at all the same as Bernard's aversion to haste. The text is in front of you and generates its own meanings. Whether I wanted it or not, a mystery arose. Contradictory duality. And I can't explain the resulting contradiction. I can’t explain anything, although I understand that there is some meaning (or maybe several) buried here.

Process storytelling

The author does not have to explain. But he can tell why and how he worked. The so-called studies on poetics do not reveal the work, but can reveal how the technical problems of creating a work are solved.

Poe in "Philosophy of Creativity" talks about "The Raven". Not about how to read this thing, but about what tasks were set in the process of creating a poetic quality. I define poetic quality as the ability of a text to generate a difference in reading without being exhausted to the bottom.

A writer (drawing, sculpting, composing music) always knows what he is doing and what it costs him. He knows that he has a task ahead of him. The push can be deaf, impulsive, subconscious. Feeling or memory. But after that, work at the table begins, and one must proceed from the possibilities of the material. In the work, the material will show its natural properties, but at the same time it will remind of the culture that formed it (an echo of intertextuality).

I don't remember which famous poem Lamartine wrote that it came to him suddenly, on a stormy night, in the forest. After his death, drafts with amendments and variants were found: this is probably the most tortured poem in French literature.

When a writer (and an artist in general) says that while working he did not think about the rules, it only means that he did not know that he knew the rules. The child speaks well mother tongue, but could not describe its grammar. However, a grammarian is not the only one who knows the rules of the language. He knows them perfectly, although the child does not know about it either. The grammarian is the only one who knows why and how the child knows the language.

To tell how a thing is written does not mean to prove that it is written well. Po said that "one thing - the quality of the work, another - the knowledge of the process." When Kandinsky and Klee talk about how they paint, neither proves that he is better than the other. When Michelangelo suggests taking a block of marble and removing the excess, he does not prove that the Vatican Pieta is better than the Rondanini Pieta.

The best pages about the creative process are mostly written by mediocre artists. In their creations, they did not reach the heights, but they were perfectly able to talk about their own actions: Vasari, Horatio Greenouf, Aaron Copland ...

Introduction

The name Umberto Eco is one of the most popular in modern culture.
Western Europe. Semiotician, aesthetician, historian of medieval literature, critic and essayist, professor at the University of Bologna and honorary doctorate of many universities in Europe and America, author of dozens of books, the number of which he annually increases with a speed that boggles the imagination,
Umberto Eco is one of the busiest volcano craters of modern Italian intellectual life. The fact that in 1980 he abruptly changed course and, instead of the usual appearance of an academic scientist, erudite and critic, appeared before the public as the author of a sensational novel that immediately gained international fame, crowned with literary awards and served as the basis for a sensational film adaptation, seemed unexpected to a number of critics.

Umberto Eco is an Italian writer, author of the world-famous novels The Name
Roses (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988), The Island on the Eve (1995). Laureate of the Strega, Angiari, National Prize of Italy (1981). Honorary citizen of Monte Carlo (1981). Knight of the French Order of Merit in Literature (1985), Order of Marshal MacLahan (UNESCO) (1985), Order
Legion of Honor (1993), Greek Order of the Golden Star (1995), Order
Grand Cross of the Italian Republic (1996).

The film adaptation also contributed to the success of the work. The writer was awarded the prestigious Italian Strega Prize (1981) and the French
Medici (1982).

It turned out that the life of the inhabitants of the Benedictine monastery of the 14th century could be interesting to people of the 20th century. And not only because the author started detective and love intrigues. But also because the effect of personal presence was created.

This novel has become the most striking proof of the correctness of French historians.
Schools of "Annals", which invited to study history through details, in particular, life. Through sociology and psychology, and not politics, as it used to be. But the point is not even in this, but in the degree of reliability, which, with this approach, allows you to feel the distant era of your own, and the Other -
Middle .

Unfortunately, the work of Umberto Eco, and in particular his novel The Name of the Rose, has not been sufficiently studied in Russia. With the exception of the article Lotman Yu., Kostyukovich
E. we were unable to find works devoted to the study of the works of the contemporary Italian writer.

Therefore, in this paper we will try to analyze the novel by Umberto Eco
"The name of the rose" from a historical point of view.

1. The composition and plot of the novel by Umberto Eco "The Name of the Rose"

In his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco paints a picture of the medieval world, describing historical events with extreme accuracy. For his novel, the author chose an interesting composition. In the so-called introduction, the author reports that he comes across an old manuscript of a monk named
Adson, which tells about the events that happened to him in the XIV century. "In a state of nervous excitement", the author "revels in the terrifying tale
Adson" and translates it for the "modern reader". The subsequent account of events is supposedly a translation of an old manuscript.

The manuscript of Adson itself is divided into seven chapters, according to the number of days, and each day
- for episodes dedicated to worship. Thus, the action in the novel takes place over seven days.

The story begins with a prologue: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God."

The work of Adson refers us to the events of 1327, “when Emperor Louis entered Italy, he was preparing, according to the providence of the Most High, to shame the vile usurper, Christ-seller and heresiarch, which in
Aviglion covered the holy name of the apostle with shame. Adson introduces the reader to the events that preceded it. At the beginning of the century, Pope Clement V moved the apostolic throne to Avignon, leaving Rome to be plundered by local sovereigns. "IN
In 1314, five German sovereigns in Frankfurt elected Louis of Bavaria as supreme overlord of the empire. However, on the same day on the opposite shore
Maina, the Palatine Count of the Rhine and the Archbishop of the city of Cologne, elected Frederick of Austria for the same board. "In 1322 Louis
The Bavarian defeated his rival Frederik. John (the new pope) excommunicated the winner, and he declared the pope a heretic. It was in this year that the chapter of the Franciscan brothers met in Perugia, and their general Michael of Cesene proclaimed as the truth of faith the position of the poverty of Christ. The pope was not pleased, in 1323 he rebelled against the doctrine of the Franciscans
Louis, apparently, then saw in the Franciscans, now hostile to the pope, powerful comrades-in-arms. Louis, having concluded an alliance with the defeated Frederick, entered Italy, accepted the crown in Milan, suppressed the discontent of the Visconti, overlaid Pisa with an army and quickly entered Rome.

These are the events of that time. I must say that Umberto Eco, as a true connoisseur of the Middle Ages, is extremely accurate in the events described.

So, events unfold at the beginning of the 14th century. A young monk, Adson, in whose name the story is being told, assigned to a learned Franciscan
William of Baskerville, comes to the monastery. Wilhelm, a former inquisitor, is assigned to investigate the unexpected death of a monk.
Adelma Otransky. Wilhelm and his assistant begin an investigation. They are allowed to talk and walk everywhere except the library. But the investigation reaches a dead end, because all the roots of the crime lead to a library representing main value and the treasury of the abbey, which contains a huge number of priceless books. Entrance to the library is prohibited even for monks, and books are not given to everyone and not all that are available in the library. In addition, the library is a labyrinth, with legends about "wandering fires" and "monsters" associated with it.
Wilhelm and Adson visit the library under the cover of night, from which they hardly manage to get out. There they meet new mysteries.

Wilhelm and Adson reveal the secret life of the abbey (meetings of monks with corrupt women, homosexuality, drug use). Adson himself succumbs to the temptation of a local peasant woman.

At this time, new murders are committed in the abbey (Venantius is found in a barrel of blood, Berengar of Arundel in a bath of water, Severin Sant
Emmeransky in his room with herbs) associated with the same secret that leads to the library, namely to a certain book. Wilhelm and
Adson manages to partially unravel the library's labyrinth and find a cache
"The Limit of Africa", a walled-up room in which the treasured book is kept.

To solve the murders, Cardinal Bertrand Podzhetsky arrives at the abbey and immediately gets down to business. He apprehends Salvatore, a wretched freak who, wanting to attract the attention of a woman with a black cat, a rooster and two eggs, was apprehended along with an unfortunate peasant woman. The woman (Adson recognized her as his friend) was accused of witchcraft and imprisoned.

During the interrogation, the cellarer Remigius tells about the torments of Dolchin and Margarita, who were burned at the stake, and how he did not resist this, although he had
Margaret connection. In desperation, the cellar takes over all the killings: Adelma from
Ontanto, Venantia of Salvemec "for being too learned", Berengar
Arundel "out of hatred for the library", Severin of St. Emmeran "for collecting herbs."

But Adson and Wilhelm manage to unravel the mystery of the library. Jorge - a blind old man, the main keeper of the library, hides from everyone the "Limit
Africa", which contains the second book of Aristotle's Poetics, which is of great interest, around which there are endless disputes in the abbey. So, for example, in the abbey it is forbidden to laugh. Jorge acts as some judge for everyone who laughs inappropriately or even draws funny pictures. In his opinion, Christ never laughed, and he forbids others to laugh. Everyone treats Jorge with respect. They are afraid of him.
Ozhnako, Jorge for many years was the real ruler of the abbey, who knew and kept all his secrets from the rest, when he began to go blind, he allowed an ignorant monk to the library, and put a monk who obeyed him at the head of the abbey. When the situation got out of control, and many people wished to unravel the mystery of the “limit of Africa” and take possession of the book
Aristotle, Jorge steals poison from Severin's laboratory and soaks the pages of a treasured book with it. The monks, turning over and wetting their fingers with saliva, gradually die, with the help of Malachy, Jorge kills Severin, locks
Abbot, who also dies.

Wilhelm solves all this with his assistant. Finally, Jorge gives them Aristotle's Poetics to read, which rebuts Jorge's ideas about the sinfulness of laughter. According to Aristotle, laughter has a cognitive value, he equates it with art. For Aristotle, laughter is
"good, pure power". Laughter is able to relieve fear, when a man laughs, he does not care about death. "However, the law can only be kept with the help of fear." From this idea could
“a Luciferian spark would fly out”, from this book “a new, crushing desire could be born to destroy death by liberation from fear”
. That's what Jorge is so afraid of. All his life, Jorge did not laugh and forbade others to do this, this gloomy old man, hiding the truth from everyone, established a lie.

As a result of Jorge's persecution, Adson drops the lantern and a fire breaks out in the library, which cannot be put out. In three days the whole abbey will burn to the ground. Only a few years later, Adson, traveling through those places, comes to the ashes, finds a few precious fragments, so that later, in one word or sentence, at least an insignificant list of lost books can be restored.

This is the interesting plot of the novel. The Name of the Rose is a kind of detective story set in a medieval monastery.

Critic Cesare Zaccaria believes that the writer's appeal to the detective genre is due to the fact that "this genre was better than others in expressing the insatiable charge of violence and fear inherent in the world in which we live." Yes, undoubtedly, many particular situations of the novel and its main conflict are quite
"read" and as an allegorical reflection of the current situation, the twentieth century.

2. Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose is a historical novel

The events in the novel give us the idea that we have a detective in front of us.
The author, with suspicious persistence, offers just such an interpretation.

Lotman Yu. writes that “already the fact that the Franciscan monk of the XIV century, the Englishman Wilhelm, distinguished by remarkable insight
Baskerville, refers the reader with his name to the story of the most famous detective exploit of Sherlock Holmes, and his chronicler bears the name
Adson (a transparent allusion to Watson by Conan Doyle) orients the reader quite clearly. Such is the role of references to narcotic drugs used by Sherlock Holmes of the 14th century to maintain intellectual activity. Like his English counterpart, periods of indifference and prostration in his mental activity are interspersed with periods of excitement associated with chewing mysterious herbs. It is during these last periods that his logical abilities and intellectual strength manifest themselves in all their splendor. The very first scenes introducing us to William of Baskerville seem to be parodic quotes from the Sherlock Holmes epic: the monk accurately describes the appearance of a runaway horse that he has never seen, and just as accurately “calculates” where to look for it, and then restores the picture of the murder - the first of those that took place within the walls of the ill-fated monastery, in which the plot of the novel unfolds - although he also did not witness it.

Lotman Yu. suggests that this is a medieval detective, and his hero is a former inquisitor (Latin inquisitor is an investigator and researcher at the same time, inquistor rerom naturae is a researcher of nature, so Wilhelm did not change his profession, but only changed the scope of his logical abilities) - this Sherlock Holmes in the cassock of a Franciscan, who is called upon to unravel some extremely ingenious crime, neutralize plans and, like a punishing sword, fall on the heads of criminals. After all
Sherlock Holmes is not only a logician - he is also a police count of Monte Cristo - a sword in his hands Higher Power(Monte Cristo - Providence, Sherlock Holmes -
Law). He overtakes Evil and does not allow him to triumph.

However, in the novel by W. Eco, events do not develop at all according to the canons of a detective, and the former inquisitor, the Franciscan William of Baskerville, turns out to be a very strange Sherlock Holmes. The hopes placed on him by the abbot of the monastery and the readers do not come true in the most decisive way: he always comes too late. His witty syllogisms and thoughtful conclusions do not prevent any of the entire chain of crimes that make up the detective layer of the plot of the novel, and the mysterious manuscript, the search for which he devoted so much effort, energy and mind, dies at the very last moment, slipping away forever from his hands.

Yu. Lotman writes: “In the end, the whole “detective” line of this strange detective story turns out to be completely obscured by other plots. The reader's interest switches to other events, and he begins to realize that he was simply fooled, that, having evoked in his memory the shadows of the hero of the "Baskerville Hound" and his faithful companion-chronicler, the author invited us to take part in one game, while he himself plays completely another. It is natural for the reader to try to figure out what kind of game is being played with him and what are the rules of this game. He himself finds himself in the position of a detective, but the traditional questions that always worry all Sherlock Holmes, Maigret and Poirot: who committed (commits) the murder (s) and why, are supplemented by a much more complex one: why and why does the cunning semiotician from Milana, appearing in a triple mask: a Benedictine monk of a provincial German monastery XIV century, the famous historian of this order, Father J. Mabillon and his mythical French translator, Abbé de Vallee?

According to Lotman, the author, as it were, opens two doors for the reader at once, leading in opposite directions. On one is written: detective, on the other: historical novel. The hoax with a story about a bibliographic rarity supposedly found and then lost refers us to the stereotypical beginnings of historical novels just as parodic and frankly as the first chapters to the detective story.

The historical moment, to which the action of "The Name of the Rose" is timed, is precisely defined in the novel. According to Adson, "a few months before the events that will be described, Louis, having concluded an alliance with the defeated Frederick, entered Italy." Louis of Bavaria, proclaimed emperor, entered Italy in 1327. Here is how Niccolo Machiavelli describes the events against which the plot of the novel unfolds: “... Louis of Bavaria became his successor on the imperial throne. By that time, the papal throne had passed to John XXII, in his pontificate the emperor did not cease to persecute the Guelphs and the church, whose defenders were mainly King Robert and the Florentines. Thus began the wars which the Visconti waged in Lombardy against the Guelphs, and
Castruccio of Lucca in Tuscany against the Florentines Imperator
Louis, in order to raise the importance of his party and at the same time be crowned, came to Italy.

At the same time, severe conflicts torn apart the Catholic Church.
The archbishop of the French city of Bordeaux, elected in 1305 to the papal throne under the name of Clement V, transferred the seat of the papal curia from Rome to Avignon in southern France (1309). King Philip of France
IV Handsome, excommunicated by the previous pope Boniface in 1303 from the church, got the opportunity to actively intervene in the affairs of the papacy and Italy.
Italy becomes an arena of rivalry french king and emperor
Holy Roman Empire (Germany). All these events are not directly described in Umberto Eco's novel. Only mentions of how Adson ended up in Italy, and, in the future, a description of the enmity of "foreigners" and
"Italians" within the walls of the monastery serve as reflections of these troubles. But they form the background of the action and are invisibly present in the plot. The author (and the monk-chronicler) deals with the internal church struggle in more detail.

The cardinal issue of the internal church struggle, reflecting the main social conflict of the era, was the issue of poverty and wealth. Founded at the beginning of the 13th century by Francis of Assisi, the Order of the Minorites (younger brothers), later the Franciscan, preached the poverty of the church. In 1215, Pope Innocent III, reluctantly, was forced to recognize the legality of the order.

Later, however, when the slogan of church poverty was taken up by militant popular heretical sects and became widespread among the masses of the common people, the attitude of the curia towards the Franciscans became a very delicate matter. Gerard Segalelli of
Parma, who called for a return to the customs of the first Christians - the community of property, compulsory labor for monks, the harsh simplicity of morals - was burned at the stake in 1296.

His teaching was picked up by Dolcino Torinelli from Novara (Piedmont), who became the head of a broad popular movement headed by
"Apostolic Brethren".

He preached the renunciation of property and the forcible realization of the early Christian utopia. Pope Clement V declared a crusade against Dolcino and his army, which had fortified the mountain
Zebello and from 1305 to 1307 stubbornly resisted, overcoming hunger, snow drifts and epidemics.

One of the central events of the novel "The Name of the Rose" is an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the pope and the emperor, who is trying to find allies in the order of St. Francis. This episode in itself is insignificant, but allows the reader to be drawn into the complex vicissitudes of the political and ecclesiastical struggle of the era.

On the periphery of the text, references to the Templars and reprisals against them, Cathars, Waldensians, Humilians, repeatedly pop up in conversations “Avignon captivity of the popes”, philosophical and theological discussions of the era. All these movements remain behind the text, but the reader needs to navigate them in order to understand the balance of power in the novel, according to Yu. Lotman.

So, before us is a historical novel. Yu. Lotman writes: “The author himself pushes the reader to precisely this conclusion in one of his autocomments to The Name of the Rose. Recalling the division of historical prose into works, in the center of which are famous persons in history, and into those where the latter are relegated to the periphery, and the images created by the author's imagination act ordinary people, U. Eco prefers the second category and, as a model, which he allegedly followed, calls
"Betrothed" by Alessandro Manzoni. However, the hints of the author of "The Name of the Rose" are always sly, and the parallel with the great work of Manzoni is another false clue thrown to the reader. The experience of the great romantic, of course, did not pass by U. Eco. The situation itself was suggested to them: the author holds in his hands an old manuscript that accidentally came to him, interesting in content, but written in a barbaric language: “Lombard idioms - without number, phrases - inopportunely used, grammar - arbitrary, periods - uncoordinated. And then - refined Hispanisms. "Mixing with amazing dexterity the most opposite properties, he manages on the same page, in the same period, in the same expression, at the same time to be rude and cutesy" .

According to Yu. Lotman, the opening episode of The Name of the Rose takes on an ironic tone. Viktor Shklovsky would call this the exposure of the reception.
But the more striking is the difference in the construction of the plot. Pushkin had reason to talk about the influence of Walter Scott on Manzoni: the adventures of a couple in love against the backdrop of widely described historical events, a story told through the adventures of a common man. Story structure
"The Name of the Rose" does not even remotely resemble such a scheme: the love affair is reduced to only one episode that does not play a significant role in the composition, all the action takes place inside the same very limited space - the monastery. A significant part of the text is reflections and conclusions. This is not the structure of a historical novel.

According to Yu. Lotman, “The image of the labyrinth, one of the symbols that runs through most different cultures, is, as it were, the emblem of W. Eco’s novel. But
“A labyrinth is essentially a crossroads, some of which have no way out, ending in dead ends that must be passed through to open a path leading to the center of this strange web.” Further, this author notes that, unlike the web, the labyrinth is fundamentally asymmetric.

But each labyrinth implies its own Theseus, the one who
"disenchants" its secrets and finds a way to the center. In the novel it is, of course, William of Baskerville. It is he who will have to enter both doors - "detective" and "historical" - the plot of our novel. Let's take a look at this figure. The hero does not belong to historical characters - he is entirely created by the author's fantasy. But by many threads it is connected with the era in which the arbitrariness of U. Eco placed it (as we shall see, not only with it!).
Wilhelm arrived at the "monastery of crimes" (as Umberto Eco, by his own admission, intended to first designate the scene) with some important mission.

The medieval world lived under the sign of the highest integrity.

Unity is divine, division comes from the devil. The unity of the church is embodied in the inquisitor, the unity of thought is in Jorge, who, despite his blindness, remembers a huge number of texts, completely, by heart, integrally. Such a memory is capable of storing texts, but is not aimed at creating new ones, and the memory of the blind Jorge is the model on which he builds his ideal library. The library, in his view, is a giant special depository, a place where texts are kept intact, and not a place where old texts serve as starting points for creating new ones.

The symbol of integrity is opposed by the symbolic image of dismemberment, analysis. Heresies ("schisms") break up the monolithic universe of the Middle Ages and single out personal relationships between man and God, man and the state, man and truth. Ultimately, this led to direct contact between man and God and eliminated the need for a church (the beginning of this trend goes back to the Waldensians, further development will pass through the ages). In the field of thought, this led to analysis: fragmentation, critical examination, recombination of theses and the creation of new texts. Jorge embodies the spirit of dogma, Wilhelm of analysis. One creates a labyrinth, the other solves the secrets of the way out of it. The mythological image of the labyrinth is associated with the rite of initiation, and Wilhelm is a fighter for the initiation of the spirit. Therefore, the library for him is not a place where dogmas are stored, but a store of food for the critical mind.

The hidden plot core of the novel is the struggle for the second book
"Poetics" of Aristotle. Wilhelm's desire to find the manuscript hidden in the labyrinth of the monastery's library and Jorge's desire to prevent its discovery underlie the intellectual duel between these characters, the meaning of which is revealed to the reader only in the last pages of the novel. This is a fight for laughter. On the second day of his stay in the monastery, Wilhelm “pulls out” from Bencius the content of an important conversation that had recently taken place in the scriptorium. “Jorge said that it was inappropriate to equip books containing truths with ridiculous drawings. And Venantius said that even Aristotle talks about jokes and word games as a means of the best knowledge of truths, and that, consequently, laughter cannot be a bad deed if it contributes to the revelation of truths
Venantius, who knows perfectly ... knew Greek very well, said that Aristotle deliberately dedicated a book to laughter, the second book of his Poetics, and that if such a great philosopher dedicates an entire book to laughter, laughter must be a serious thing.

Laughter for Wilhelm is connected with the mobile, creative world, with the world open to freedom of judgment. Carnival liberates thought. But the carnival has another face - the face of rebellion.

Kelarus Remigius explains to Wilhelm why he joined the rebellion
Dolcino: “... I can’t even understand why I did what I did then. You see, in the case of El Salvador, everything is quite understandable. He is one of the serfs, his childhood was squalor, a hungry pestilence ... For him, Dolchin personified the struggle, the destruction of the power of the masters ... But everything was different with me! My parents are citizens, I have not seen hunger! For me it was like... I don't know how to say... Something like a huge holiday, like a carnival. At Dolchin in the mountains, until we started eating the meat of our comrades who died in the battle ... Until so many died of hunger that it was no longer possible to eat, and we dumped the corpses from the slopes of Rebello to the grass of vultures and wolves ... Or maybe even and then... we breathed air... how shall I put it? Freedom.

Until then, I did not know what freedom is. “It was a wild carnival, and at carnivals everything is always upside down.”

Umberto Eco, according to Yu. Lotman, knows the theory of carnival very well
M. M. Bakhtin and the deep trace that she left not only in science, but also in the social thought of Europe in the middle of the 20th century. He knows and takes into account both Huizinga's works and books like X. G.'s The Jester's Festival.
Cox. But his interpretation of laughter and carnival, which puts everything upside down, does not completely coincide with Bakhtin's. Laughter does not always serve freedom.

According to Lutman Yu., Eco's novel is, of course, the creation of today's thought and could not have been created even a quarter of a century ago. It shows the impact historical research subjected to recent decades I will reconsider many deeply rooted notions about the Middle Ages. After the work of the French historian Le Goff, defiantly titled "For a new Middle Ages", the attitude towards this era has undergone a broad rethinking. In the works of historians Philip Aries, Jacques Delumeau
(France), Carlo Ginzburg (Italy), A. Ya. Gurevich (USSR) and many others, interest in the course of life, to
"non-historical personalities", "mentality", i.e., to those features of the historical worldview that people themselves consider so natural that they simply do not notice, to heresies as a reflection of this popular mentality. This radically changed the relationship between the historian and the historical novelist, who belongs to the artistically most significant tradition that came from Walter Scott and to which Manzoni, Pushkin, and Leo Tolstoy belonged (historical novels about "great people" rarely led to artistic successes). , but were often popular with the most illegible reader).
If before the novelist could say: I am interested in what historians do not do, now the historian introduces the reader to those corners of the past that were previously visited only by novelists.

Umberto Eco closes this circle: a historian and a novelist at the same time, he writes a novel, but looks through the eyes of a historian, whose scientific position is shaped by the ideas of our day. An informed reader catches in the novel the echoes of discussions about the medieval utopia of the "country of Kokan"
(Kukany) and extensive literature about the inverted world (interest in texts,
“turned inside out”, in the last two decades has become downright epidemic). But not only a modern look at the era of the Middle Ages - in the novel by Umberto Eco, the reader is constantly faced with a discussion of issues that affect not only historical, but also the burning interests of readers. We will immediately discover the problem of drug addiction, and disputes about homosexuality, and reflections on the nature of left and right extremism, and reasoning about the unconscious partnership of the victim and the executioner, as well as the psychology of torture - all this equally belongs to both
XIV and XX centuries.

A cross-cutting motif sounds persistently in the novel: a utopia realized with the help of blood flows (Dolcino), and serving the truth with the help of lies.
(inquisitor). This is a dream of justice, the apostles of which do not spare either their own or other people's lives. Broken by torture, Remigius shouts to his pursuers: “We wanted better world peace and blessings for all. We wanted to kill the war, the war that you bring into the world. All wars because of your stinginess! And now you prick our eyes with the fact that for the sake of justice and happiness, we shed a little blood! That's the trouble! That we shed too little of it! And it was necessary so that all the water in Carnasco became scarlet, all the water that day in Stavello.

But not only utopia is dangerous, any truth that excludes doubts is dangerous.
So, even a student of Wilhelm at some moment is ready to exclaim:
“Well, at least the Inquisition arrived in time,” because he “was seized by the thirst for truth.” Truth undoubtedly breeds fanaticism. Truth beyond doubt, a world without laughter, faith without irony - this is not only the ideal of medieval asceticism, it is also the program of modern totalitarianism. And when, at the end of the novel, the opponents stand face to face, we have before us images not only of the XIV, but also of the XX century. "You are the devil," says Wilhelm Jorge.

Eco does not dress modernity in the clothes of the Middle Ages and does not force the Franciscan and Benedictine to discuss the problems of general disarmament or human rights. He just discovered that and the time of Wilhelm
Baskerville, and the time of its author is one epoch, that from the Middle Ages to the present day we are struggling with the same questions and that, consequently, it is possible, without violating historical plausibility, to create a topical novel from the life of the XIV century.

The correctness of this idea is confirmed by one essential consideration.
The action of the novel takes place in a monastery, the library of which contains the richest collection of Apocalypses, once brought by Jorge from
Spain. Jorge is full of eschatological expectations and infects the entire monastery with them. He preaches the power of the Antichrist, who has already subjugated the whole world, entwined it with his conspiracy, became the prince of this world: “He is tense in his speeches and in his labors, and in cities and estates, in his arrogant universities and in cathedrals.” The power of Antichrist surpasses the power of God, the power of Evil is stronger than the power of Good. This sermon sows fear, but it is also born of fear. In an era when the ground is slipping from under people's feet, the past is losing confidence, and the future is painted in tragic colors, people are seized by an epidemic of fear. Under the power of fear, people turn into a crowd, obsessed with atavistic myths. They draw a terrible picture of the victorious procession of the devil, imagine the mysterious and powerful conspiracies of his servants, the hunt for witches begins, the search for dangerous but invisible enemies. An atmosphere of mass hysteria is created when all legal guarantees and all the gains of civilization are cancelled. It is enough to say about a person “sorcerer”, “witch”, “enemy of the people”, “freemason”, “intellectual” or any other word that in this historical situation is a sign of doom, and his fate is decided: he automatically moves to the place of the “culprit”. of all troubles, a participant in an invisible conspiracy, ”any defense of which is tantamount to a recognition of one’s own involvement in an insidious host.

Umberto Eco's novel begins with a quote from the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word" - and ends with a Latin quote, melancholy reporting that the rose has withered, but the word "rose", the name "rose" has remained. The real hero of the novel is the Word. Wilhelm and Jorge serve him differently. People create words, but words control people. And the science that studies the place of the word in culture, the relationship between the word and the person, is called semiotics. The Name of the Rose, a novel about the word and man, is a semiotic novel.

It can be assumed that the action of the novel takes place in a medieval monastery for a reason. Given Eco's predilection for understanding origins, you have a better idea of ​​what prompted him to write the novel The Name of the Rose in the late 70s. In those years, it seemed that Europe had only a few “minutes” left before the apocalyptic “midnight” in the form of a military and ideological confrontation between the two systems, seething various movements from ultra to
"green" and sexual minorities in one common cauldron of intertwined concepts, heated speeches, dangerous actions. Eco challenged.

Describing the background of modern ideas and movements, he thereby tried to cool their ardor. In general, a well-known art practice is the killing or poisoning of fictional characters as a warning to the living.

Eco directly writes that in the “Middle Ages the roots of all our modern
"hot" problems, and the feuds of monks of different orders are not much different from the fights between Trotskyists and Stalinists.

3. Notes on the margins of the "Name of the Rose"

The novel is accompanied by Marginal Notes of The Name of the Rose, in which the author brilliantly talks about the process of creating his novel.

The novel ends with a Latin phrase, which translates as follows: “Rose with the same name - with our names we will continue.” As the author himself notes, it raised many questions, therefore “Marginal Notes” of “The Name of the Rose” begin with an “explanation” of the meaning of the title.

“The title “The Name of the Rose” arose almost by accident,” writes Umberto Eco, “and it suited me, because the rose as a symbolic figure is so saturated with meanings that it has almost no meaning: the rose is mystical, and the tender rose lived no longer than the rose, the war Scarlet and White roses, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, Rosicrucians 18, a rose smells like a rose, call it a rose or not, rosa fresca aulentissima. The title, as intended, confuses the reader. He cannot prefer any one interpretation. Even if he gets to the implied nominalist interpretations of the last sentence, he will still come to it only at the very end, having had time to make a lot of other assumptions. The name should confuse thoughts, not discipline them.

At first, writes W. Eco, he wanted to call the book "The Abbey of Crimes", but such a title set readers on a detective story and would confuse those who are only interested in intrigue. The author's dream is to call the novel "Adson from Melk", because this hero stands aside, occupies, as it were, a neutral position. The title "The Name of the Rose", notes W. Eco, suited him,
“because the rose, as it were, is a symbolic figure so full of meanings that it has almost no meaning ... The name, as intended, disorients the reader ...
The name should confuse thoughts, not discipline them. Thus, the writer emphasizes that the text lives its own life, often independent of it. Hence new, different readings, interpretations, to which the title of the novel should set. And it is no coincidence that the author placed this Latin quotation from a work of the 12th century at the end of the text so that the reader would make various assumptions, thoughts and compare, bewildered and argue.

“I wrote the novel because I felt like it,” the author writes.
I think this is reason enough to sit down and start talking. Man from birth is a storytelling animal. I started writing in March 1978. I wanted to poison the monk. I think that every novel is born from such thoughts. The rest of the pulp builds up by itself.

The novel takes place in the Middle Ages. The author writes: “At first I was going to settle the monks in a modern monastery (I came up with a monk-investigator, a subscriber of the Manifesto). But since any monastery, and especially an abbey, still lives on with the memory of the Middle Ages, I woke up the medievalist in me from hibernation and sent me to rummage through my own archive. 1956 monograph on medieval aesthetics, 1969 hundred pages on the same subject; several articles in between; studies of medieval culture in 1962, in connection with Joyce; finally, in 1972, a large study on the Apocalypse and illustrations for the interpretation of the Apocalypse by Beat of Lieban: in general, my Middle Ages was kept in combat readiness. I raked out a bunch of materials - abstracts, photocopies, extracts. All this has been selected since 1952 for the most incomprehensible purposes: for the history of freaks, for a book about medieval encyclopedias, for the theory of lists ... At some point, I decided that since the Middle Ages is my mental everyday life, the easiest way is to place the action directly in the Middle Ages ” .

“So, I decided not only that the story would be about the Middle Ages. I also decided that the story would come from the Middle Ages, from the lips of the chronicler of that era,
- writes the author. To this end, Umberto re-read a huge number of medieval chronicles, "studied rhythm, naivety."

According to Eco, the work on the novel is a cosmological event:
“For storytelling, first of all, it is necessary to create a certain world, arranging it as best as possible and thinking it through in detail. History played a special role in the world I created. Therefore, I endlessly re-read medieval chronicles and as I read, I realized that the novel would inevitably have to introduce such things that I had not originally thought of, for example, the struggle for poverty and the persecution of the Inquisition against half-brothers.
For example, why did half-brothers appear in my book, and with them the fourteenth century? If we are to compose a medieval story, I would take
XIII or XII century - I knew these eras much better. But a detective was needed. An Englishman is best (intertextual citation). This detective had to be distinguished by his love of observations and a special ability to interpret external signs. Such qualities can only be found among the Franciscans, and even then after Roger Bacon. At the same time, we find a developed theory of signs only among the Occamists. Rather, it also existed before, but earlier the interpretation of signs either had a purely symbolic character, or saw only ideas and universals behind the signs. And it was only from Bacon to Ockham, in this single period, that signs were used to study individuals. So I realized that the plot would have to unfold in the fourteenth century, and was very dissatisfied. This was much more difficult for me. If so - new readings, and after them - a new discovery. I firmly understood that a fourteenth-century Franciscan, even an Englishman, could not be indifferent to the discussion of poverty. Especially if he is a friend or student
Occam or just a man of his circle. By the way, at first I wanted to make Occam himself an investigator, but then I abandoned this idea, because as a person Venerabilis Inceptor6 is not very sympathetic to me "
.

The author explains the reason for choosing this time period in his novel:
“Why is the action dated precisely to the end of November 1327?
Because by December Michael Tszensky is already in Avignon. This is what it means to fully equip the world of the historical novel. Some elements, such as the number of steps on the stairs, depend on the will of the author, while others, such as Michael's movements, depend only on the real world, which, purely by chance, and only in novels of this type, is wedged into the arbitrary world of the narrative.

According to Eco, "the world we created itself indicates where the plot should go." Indeed, having chosen the Middle Ages for his novel,
Eco only directs the action, which unfolds on its own, according to the laws and logic of the events of those years. And this is especially interesting.

In his notes, Eco reveals to the reader the whole "kitchen of creation" of his work. So we learn that the choice of certain historical details caused some difficulties for the writer:

“There was trouble with the labyrinth. All labyrinths known to me - and I used Santarcangeli's excellent monograph - were roofless. All completely intricate, with many cycles. But I needed a labyrinth with a roof (who has seen a library without a roof!). And not very difficult.
The labyrinth, congested with corridors and dead ends, has almost no ventilation.
And ventilation was necessary for the fire. After two or three months of labor, I myself built the necessary labyrinth. And all the same, in the end, he pierced it with slots-embrasures, otherwise, as it comes down to it, there might not be enough air.

Umberto Eco writes: “I had to fence off a closed space, a concentric universe, and in order to close it better, it was necessary to reinforce the unity of place with the unity of time (unity of action, alas, remained very problematic). Hence the Benedictine abbey, where all life is measured by canonical clocks.

In his "Notes" W. Eco explains the basic concepts of postmodernism, its historical and aesthetic origins. The author notes that he sees the Middle Ages “in the depths of any subject, even one that does not seem to be connected with the Middle Ages, but is actually connected. Everything is connected." In the medieval chronicles, U. Eco discovered “an echo of intertextuality”, for “all books talk about other books, ... every story retells a story that has already been told.” The novel, the writer claims, is a whole world created by the author, and this cosmological structure lives according to its own laws and requires the author to comply with them: “Characters must obey the laws of the world in which they live. That is, the writer is a prisoner of his own premises. W. Eco writes about the play of the author with the reader, which separates the writer from the reader. It “consisted in highlighting the figure of Adson in old age as often as possible, letting him comment on what he sees and hears as a young Adson .... The figure of Adson is also important because he, acting as a participant and recorder of events, does not always understand and will not understand in old age what he writes about. “My goal was,” notes the author, “to make everything understandable through the words of someone who does not understand anything.”

U. Eco in "Notes ..." emphasizes the need for an objective image of reality. Art is an escape from personal feeling," for literature is called upon to "create a reader," one who is ready to play the author's game. The reader is naturally interested in the plot, and here it is immediately evident that The Name of the Rose is a detective novel, but it differs from others in that “little is found out in it, and the investigator is defeated. And this is not accidental, U. Eco notes, since “a book cannot have only one plot. That doesn't happen." The author speaks about the existence of several labyrinths in his novel, first of all, the manneristic one, the way out of which can be found by trial and error. But
Wilhelm lives in a world of rhizome - a grid in which lines - paths are crossed, therefore, there is no center and exit: “My text is, in essence, the history of labyrinths. Special attention the writer pays irony, which he calls a metalanguage game. A writer can participate in this game, taking it quite seriously, even sometimes not understanding it: “This,” notes U. Eco, “is a distinctive property (but also insidiousness) of ironic creativity.” The author's conclusion is as follows: “There are obsessions; they have no owner; the books speak to each other, and a real judicial investigation must show that we are the culprits.”

Thus, in his "Notes" Umberto Eco reveals not only the true meaning of creating his work, but also the whole technology of writing it.

Thanks to the vast knowledge of Umberto Eco on the history of the Middle Ages, his knowledge in the field of semiotics, literature, criticism, as well as due to the painstaking work on the word, the amusement of the plot, the choice of details, we get great pleasure from reading a historical novel.

Conclusion

Before Umberto Eco published his first work of fiction, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, on the threshold of his fiftieth birthday, he was known in Italian academic circles and throughout scientific world as an authoritative specialist in the philosophy of the Middle Ages and in the field of semiotics - the science of signs. Thus, it is no coincidence that the action of his novel takes place in the Middle Ages.

Umberto Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose" implements concepts that feed the author's scientific thought, that it is a translation of Umberto Eco's semiotic and cultural ideas into the language of a literary text. This gives reason to read the "Name of the Rose" in different ways.

“I wanted the reader to have fun,” Eco later wrote. And indeed, when reading this novel, you really get pleasure, and besides, you get acquainted with the history of the Middle Ages. Not coincidentally, it was noted that after the publication of the book, the number of students enrolled in the department of the history of the Middle Ages increased sharply.

All this suggests that Umrebto Eco's novel "The Name of the Rose" is a complete and accurate guide to the Middle Ages. Anthony Burgess writes in his review: “People read Arthur Haylib to find out how the airport lives. If you read this book, you will not have the slightest doubt about how the monastery functioned in the 14th century.”

The Brazilian priest, one of the main representatives of the “liberation theology” Leonardo Boff writes about Eco’s novel: “This is not only a Gothic story from the life of an Italian Benedictine monastery of the 14th century.
Undoubtedly, the author uses all the cultural realities of the era (with an abundance of details and erudition), observing the greatest historical accuracy. But all this for the sake of questions that remain of high importance today, as they were yesterday. There is a struggle between two projects of life, personal and social: one project stubbornly strives to preserve the existing, to preserve by all means, up to the destruction of other people and self-destruction; the second project strives for the permanent opening of the new, even at the cost of its own destruction.

List of used literature

1. Andreev L. Artistic synthesis and postmodernism //Questions of literature.-

2001.- №1.- p.3-38

2. Zatonky D. Postmodernism in the historical interior //Questions of Literature.- 1996.-№3.- p. 182-205.

3. Kostyukovich E. Eco Orbits // Eco W. The name of the rose. - M., 1998. - S. 645-649

4. Lotman Yu. Exit from the labyrinth // Eco U. The name of the rose. - M: Book Chamber,

1989.- p.468-481.

5. Lee Marshall and Umberto Eco. Under the Net (interview)//"Cinema Art"

6. Reingold S. "Poison the Monk" or human values by Umberto

Eco // Foreign Literature. -1994.-№4.

7. Umberto Eco Internal reviews. Translation from Italian Helena

Kostyukovich // "Foreign Literature" 1997, No. 5

8. Travina E. Umberto ECO // Reality is a fantasy that people believe in.

Questions of Literature. 1996 №5

9. Eco U. Notes on the margins of the “Name of the Rose” // Name of the Rose. - M: Book Chamber,

1989 - pp. 425-467.
10. Eco W. The name of the rose. Detective. Issue. 2. -M .: Book Chamber, 1989. - 496s.