A strange combination of numbers 2 and 3 haunted the writer with the mysterious pseudonym Green all his life.
Mystical find
When in 1966 in Feodosia it was decided to found the literary-memorial museum of Alexander Green, one of the most important finds was the multivolume encyclopedic dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, which belonged to the writer. This was his first book purchase in Feodosia. It all started with her.
In the house at number 10 on Gallery Green Street, or rather Grinevsky, he lived from 1924 to 1929. It was here that most of the works were born. And he ended up by the sea thanks to his first novel, The Shining World. Having received a fee for him, Alexander Green went with his wife, Nina Mironova, on a trip to the Crimea. Returning, the couple bought an apartment in Leningrad, but after a while they sold it and moved to Feodosia.
Of course, there was no picture of a ship on the house, and its rooms did not resemble either the captain's cabin or the clipper's cabin, as the museum's exhibition halls are now called. The house was quite ordinary. Unless there were a lot of books in it.
Inspired by vocabulary
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The study is the only memorial room in the museum. Therefore, of course, it looks the same as during the life of the owner. There is a table against the wall with an inkwell and a lamp, next to it is a cabinet filled with books. Green bought them at the earliest opportunity.
In those years, there were two bookstores in Feodosia, in each of which Green was a regular customer. It is not surprising that he very quickly made friends with the sellers, and they began to leave new items for him. Three years after moving in his home library, there were about three hundred books, both Russian and foreign. At the same time, the writer himself did not think that he was collecting them: “It is good to start collecting books in old age, when the Book of Life is read,” Green admitted.
I read dictionaries and reference books for general development. The writer himself said that he rarely took them in hand to check any data. After all, he had his own world, his own country, Greenlandia. Green came up with not only names, but also place names. And the impetus to the imagination was often given … by dictionary entries.
So, on the spine of volume 18 of the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary is written "Gravilat do Davenant". Now it is difficult to say why, but, apparently, it was these words that inspired Green to come up with the name of the hero of the novel "The Road to Nowhere", Tyrrey Davenant. The surname of another hero is Galeran. It is consonant with Gravilat, but even more similar to the name of the street where the house is located - Gallery.
Namesake from Foggy Albion
Green acquired the Brockhaus and Efron dictionary because he decided: in provincial Feodosia, far from large libraries, one cannot do without it. After the death of the writer, the dictionary miraculously survived, and then somehow ended up in the library of the Tavria publishing house, from where it was transferred to the museum. What attracted the attention of the writer exactly 18 volume? Is it really an accident? Maybe. But, knowing Green's mind and imagination, hardly.
The fact is that it is in this volume that the surname "Green" is found. Moreover, there are as many as six of them here. And Green was keenly interested in his contemporaries, namesakes by pseudonym.
It is possible that while flipping through this volume, he saw an article about the playwright Robert Greene, by the way, Shakespeare's sworn enemy. The encyclopedia said that the playwright worked fairly easily, receiving good royalties from publishers. But the money did not stay with him. Robert Greene wasted them instantly, leading a dissolute life and rotating in the circles of the English literary bohemia of the late 16th century.
What is the connection between Alexander Green and his English namesake? Straight. The ill-wishers spoke about Alexander Green in the same way … Yes, there are so many legends about him that it is thankless to understand their veracity. But even if it was one of the fables, Alexander Green could well become interested in his namesake, who so reminded him. So he borrowed the names of the heroes of the novel from the volume where the namesake was mentioned. True, we can only guess what was actually going on in the writer's head.
Yulia Skopich