Сага о Форсайтах. Собственник

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93
          Г 60

© КАРО, 2008
ISBN 9785992501582

Голсуорси Дж.

Г 60
Сага о Форсайтах. Собственник: Книга для чтения
на английском языке. —  СПб.: КАРО, 2011. — 608 с.

ISBN 9785992501582.

Вниманию читающей публики предлагается первая книга из трилогии Нобелевского лауреата Джона Голсуорси
(1867–1933) «Сага о Форсайтах» — «Собственник». Жизнь
высшего общества Лондона представляет немалый интерес
для тех, кто хочет знать, как вести себя, не теряя лица, не
выказывая открыто никаких эмоций, не унижая собственного
достоинства, соблюдая приличия, при том что за фасадом
чинности и благопристойности в большом семействе Форсайтов
бушуют общечеловеческие страсти: любовь, предательство,
измена, смерть, желание мести, — и где основополагающим
чувством является чувство собственности.
Некоторые исследователи творчества Голсуорси приравнивают его — по сложности языка и глубине мыслей —
ко Льву Толстому, поэтому в книге приводится обширный
словарь и дается масса комментариев, чтобы читатель смог
оценить по достоинству это самое известное произведение
о жизни «цвета нации» викторианской Англии.
Неадаптированный текст на языке оригинала снабжен
обширным словарем и подробными комментариями. Книга
предназначена для студентов языковых вузов и всех любителей английской литературы.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ93

PREFACE

“The Forsyte Saga” was the title originally destined for that part of it which is called “The Man
of Property”; and to adopt it for the collected
chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the
Forsytean tenacity that is in all of us. The word
Saga might be objected to on the ground that1 it
connotes the heroic and that there is little heroism in these pages. But it is used with a suitable
irony; and, after all, this long tale, though it may
deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a giltedged period, is not devoid of the essential heat
of conflict. Discounting for the gigantic stature
and bloodthirstiness of old days, as they have
come down to us in fairytale and legend, the folk
of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their
possessive instincts, and as little proof against the
inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames,

1 on the ground that — (разг.) на том основании, что

To my wife: I dedicate the Forsyte saga
in its entirety, believing it to be of all
my works the least unworthy of one
without whose encouragement, sympathy and criticism I could never have
become even such a writer as I am.

PREFACE

or even young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in
days that never were, seem to startle out from
their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a
Forsyte of the Victorian erа1, we may be sure that
tribal instinct was even then the prime force, and
that “family” and the sense of home and property
counted as they do to this day, for all the recent
efforts to “talk them out.”
So many people have written and claimed that
their families were the originals of the Forsytes
that one has been almost encouraged to believe
in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners
change and modes evolve, and “Timothy’s on the
Bayswater Road” becomes a nest of the unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look
upon its like again, nor perhaps on such a one as
James or old Jolyon. And yet the figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judges reassure us daily that our earthly paradise is still a
rich preserve, where the wild raiders, Beauty and
Passion, come stealing in, filching security from
beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark
at a brass band, so will the essential Soames
in human nature ever rise up uneasily against
the dissolution which hovers round the folds of
ownership.

1 the Victorian era — время царствования королевы
Виктории (1837–1901)

PREFACE

“Let the dead Past bury its dead” would be a
better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragicomic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure
on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect
novelty.
But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature,
under its changing pretensions and clothes, is and
ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and might,
after all, be a much worse animal.
Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and ‘fallof’ is in some sort pictured
in “The Forsyte Saga,” we see now that we have
but jumped out of a fryingpan into a fire. It
would be difficult to substantiate a claim that
the case of England was better in 1913 than it
was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at old
Jolyon’s to celebrate the engagement of June to
Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan
gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with
Michael Mont, the state of England is as surely
too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties it was
too congealed and lowpercented. If these chronicles had been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motorcar, and
flyingmachine; the arrival of a cheap Press; the
decline of country life and increase of the towns;

PREFACE

the birth of the Cinema. Men are, in fact, quite
unable to control their own inventions; they at
best develop adaptability to the new conditions
those inventions create.
But this long tale is no scientific study of a
period; it is rather an intimate incarnation of the
disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives of
men.
The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may
possibly have observed, present, except through
the senses of other characters, is a concretion
of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive
world.
One has noticed that readers, as they wade on
through the salt waters of the Saga, are inclined
more and more to pity Soames, and to think that
in doing so they are in revolt against the mood
of his creator. Far from it!1 He, too, pities Soames,
the tragedy of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without
quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur loves Soames
as he feels he ought to be loved. But in pitying
Soames, readers incline, perhaps, to animus against
Irene: After all, they think, he wasn’t a bad fellow, it wasn’t his fault; she ought to have forgiven him, and so on!

1 Far from it! — (зд.) Ничего подобного!

PREFACE

And, taking sides1, they lose perception of the
simple truth, which underlies the whole story, that
where sex attraction is utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity,
or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a
repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought
to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact
it never does. And where Irene seems hard and
cruel, as in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Goupenor
Gallery, she is but wisely realistic — knowing that
the least concession is the inch which precedes
the impossible, the repulsive ell.
A criticism one might pass on the last phase
of the Saga is the complaint that Irene and Jolyon those rebels against property — claim spiritual
property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism, as the tale is told. No father and mother
could have let the boy marry Fleur without
knowledge of the facts; and the facts determine
Jon, not the persuasion of his parents. Moreover,
Jolyon’s persuasion is not on his own account, but
on Irene’s, and Irene’s persuasion becomes a reiterated: “Don’t think of me, think of yourself!” That
Jon, knowing the facts, can realise his mother’s
feelings, will hardly with justice be held proof that
she is, after all, a Forsyte.

1 taking sides — (зд.) становясь на чьюлибо сторону;
поддерживая одного или другого

PREFACE

But though the impingement of Beauty and
the claims of Freedom on a possessive world are
the main prepossessions of the Forsyte Saga, it
cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the uppermiddle class. As the old Egyptians
placed around their mummies the necessaries of a
future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the figures of Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of old Jolyon and
James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little life hereafter, a little balm in
the hurried Gilead of a dissolving “Progress.”
If the uppermiddle class, with other classes,
is destined to “move on” into amorphism, here,
pickled in these pages, it lies under glass for strollers in the wide and illarranged museum of Letters. Here it rests, preserved in its own juice: The
Sense of Property. 1922.

THE MAN
OF PROPERTY

“…You will answer
The slaves are ours…”

Shakespeare,
Merchant of Venice

To Edward Garnett