Бойня номер пять

УДК	 372.8
ББК	 81.2 Англ-93
	
В 73
Оптовая торговля:
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Воннегут К.
В 73	
Бойня номер пять: Книга для чтения на английском 
языке. — СПб.: КОРОНА принт, КАРО, 2010. — 
256 с. — (Серия “Modern Prose”).
ISBN 978-5-9925-0566-5.
Предлагаем вниманию читателей роман знаменитого американского писателя К. Воннегута, в основе которого — впечатления автора от событий февраля 1945 г., когда союзническая 
авиация бомбила Дрезден.
Книга снабжена заданиями на понимание текста, комментариями и словарем.
Для учащихся языковых вузов и всех любителей англоязычной литературы.
УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
ISBN 978-5-9925-0566-5
©КОРОНА принт, 2004 
© КАРО, 2010

Kurt Vonnegut
A FOURTH-GENERATION GERMAN-AMERICAN  
NOW LIVING IN EASY CIRCUMSTANCES
ON CAPE COD
[AND SMOKING TOO MUCH],
WHO, AS AN AMERICAN INFANTRY SCOUT
HORS DE COMBAT,
AS A PRISONER OF WAR,
WITNESSED THE FIRE-BOMBING
OF DRESDEN, GERMANY,
”THE FLORENCE OF THE ELBE,”
A LONG TIME AGO,
AND SURVIVED TO TELL THE TALE.
THIS IS A NOVEL 
SOMEWHAT IN THE TELEGRAPHIC SCHIZOPHRENIC 
 
MANNER OF TALES
OF THE PLANET TRALFAMADORE,
WHERE THE FLYING SAUCERS
COME FROM. 
PEACE.

For
Mary O’Hare
and
Gerhard Müller
The cattle are lowing,
The Baby awakes.
But the little Lord Jesus
No crying He makes.

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, 
anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really 
was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. 
Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his 
personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. 
And so on. I’ve changed all the names.
I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim 
money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There 
must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard 
V. O’Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who 
took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked 
up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard 
Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live 
under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at 
5

first, because everybody had to work so hard, and 
because there wasn’t much shelter or food or clothing. 
But things were much better now. He had a pleasant 
little apartment, and his daughter was getting an 
excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the 
Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.1
KURT VONNEGUT
He sent O’Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and 
here is what it said:
“I wish you and your family also as to your friend 
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope 
that we’ll meet again in a world of peace and freedom 
in the taxi cab if the accident will.”
I like that very much: “If the accident will.” 
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book 
cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got 
home from the Second World War twenty-three years 
ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about 
the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to 
do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, 
too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me 
a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my 
mind then — not enough of them to make a book, 
anyway. And not many words come now, either, when 
I have become an old fart with his memories and his 
Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.
1	 So it goes. — Вот такие дела.
6

I think of how useless the Dresden part of my 
memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has 
been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous 
limerick:
There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:
“You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won’t pee, you old fool.”
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE…
And I’m reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin,
I work in a lumbermill there.
The people I meet when I walk down the street,
They say, “What’s your name?”
And I say,
“My name is Yon Yonson,
I work in Wisconsin… “
And so on to infinity.
Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me 
what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the 
main thing was a book about Dresden.
I said that to Harrison Starr, the movie-maker, one 
time, and he raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an 
antiwar book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
7

KURT VONNEGUT
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re 
writing antiwar books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, ‘Why don‘t you write an anti-glacier book 
instead?’”
What he meant, of course, was that there would 
always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. 
I believe that, too.
And, even if wars didn’t keep coming like glaciers, 
there would still be plain old death.
When I was somewhat younger, working on my 
famous Dresden book, I asked an old war buddy named 
Bernard V. O’Hare if I could come to see him. He was 
a district attorney in Pennsylvania. I was a writer on 
Cape Cod. We had been privates in the war, infantry 
scouts. We had never expected to make any money after 
the war, but we were doing quite well.
I had the Bell Telephone Company find him for me. 
They are wonderful that way. I have this disease late at 
night sometimes, involving alcohol and the telephone. 
I get drunk, and I drive my wife away with a breath like 
mustard gas and roses. And then, speaking gravely and 
elegantly into the telephone, I ask the telephone operators 
to connect me with this friend or that one, from whom 
I have not heard in years.
I got O’Hare on the line in this way. He is short and 
I am tall. We were Mutt and Jeff in the war. We were 
captured together in the war. I told him who I was on 
the telephone. He had no trouble believing it. He was 
8

up. He was reading. Everybody else in his house was 
asleep.
“Listen —” I said, “I’m writing this book about 
Dresden. I’d like some help remembering stuff. I 
wonder if I could come down and see you, and we could 
drink and talk and remember.”
He was unenthusiastic. He said he couldn’t rememSLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE…
ber much. He told me, though, to come ahead.
“I think the climax of the book will be the execution 
of poor old Edgar Derby,” I said. “The irony is so great. 
A whole city gets burned down, and thousands and 
thousands of people are killed. And then this one 
American foot soldier is arrested in the ruins for taking 
a teapot. And he’s given a regular trial, and then he’s 
shot by a firing squad.”
“Um,” said O’Hare.
“Don’t you think that’s really where the climax 
should come?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he said. “That’s 
your trade, not mine.”
As a trafficker in climaxes and thrills and characterization and wonderful dialogue and suspense and 
confrontations, I had outlined the Dresden story many 
times. The best outline I ever made, or anyway the 
prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper.
I used my daughter’s crayons, a different color for 
each main character. One end of the wallpaper was the 
beginning of the story, and the other end was the end, 
and then there was all that middle part, which was the 
middle. And the blue line met the red line and then the 
9

KURT VONNEGUT
yellow line, and the yellow line stopped because the 
character represented by the yellow line was dead. And 
so on. The destruction of Dresden was represented by 
a vertical band of orange cross-hatching, and all the 
lines that were still alive passed through it, came out 
the other side.
The end, where all the lines stopped, was a beetfield 
on the Elbe, outside of Halle. The rain was coming 
down. The war in Europe had been over for a couple 
of weeks. We were formed in ranks, with Russian 
soldiers guarding us — Englishmen, Americans, 
Dutchmen, Belgians, Frenchmen, Canadians, South 
Africans, New Zealanders, Australians, thousands of 
us about to stop being prisoners of war. And on the 
other side of the field were thousands of Russians and 
Poles and Yugoslavians and so on guarded by American soldiers. An exchange was made there in the rain — 
one for one. O’Hare and I climbed into the back of an 
American truck with a lot of others. O’Hare didn’t have 
any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a 
ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do. The rabid little 
American I call Paul Lazzaro in this book had about a 
quart of diamonds and emeralds and rubies and so on. 
He had taken these from dead people in the cellars of 
Dresden. So it goes.
An idiotic Englishman, who had lost all his teeth 
somewhere, had his souvenir in a canvas bag. The bag 
was resting on my insteps. He would peek into the bag 
every now and then, and he would roll his eyes and 
swivel his scrawny neck, trying to catch people looking 
10