[This first draft of a very incomplete entry immediately
follows Martin Luther’s for no other
reason than their chronological order. As for its content, it is built around
the title’s description; sketched quickly, as the whole exposition is fairly
predictable.]
***
I first got acquainted with
Rabelais in a thoroughly sanitized retelling, a “Rabelais for Boys,” and so did my daughters: their version was also
a “Rabelais for Boys,” which is a
slightly ironic designation, as both boys and girls are inquisitive enough to
discover the truth about the inadequacy of their heavily abridged version, and
to want to do something about that. With the same healthily agitated interest
that I was going after the forbidden fare of the ever-pornographic classic Ivan
Barkov and of the youthfully wicked genius Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov (there
was no such thing as “forbidden Pushkin,”
though, as the glorious Academic Edition
of the Complete Pushkin in my home library was giving me no incentive to
look any further), I was looking out for an unabridged, “privately printed” and
“faithfully translated into… English” Rabelais, and, having found it easily in
the foreign languages antiquarian bookstore near my home in central Moscow, the
matter was settled to my adequate satisfaction.
Having said that, there is a wide
gap between the straight pornography for pornography’s sake, of Barkov, or the
very young Lermontov, or even young Pushkin’s Gavriiliada, on the one hand, and the humanistic, historically
erudite, and philosophically significant pornography (granted!) of François
Rabelais (1483? or 1494?-1553), on the other. Ironically, I have drawn a kind
of parallel here with the iconoclastic rampage of Lorenzo Valla, featured in my
earlier entry An Iconoclast At St.
Peter’s Court. Although the Lutheran mischief was already very much afoot
at the time of Rabelais’ writing of Gargantua
et Pantagruel, it was still the era when erudite humanistic scholarship and
worldly acumen were higher prized than unimpeachable Christian Roman Catholic
orthodoxy. This is not to say that everybody loved his superbly original,
insanely lively and utterly indecent writing (he was wholeheartedly supported
by King François I and by the French high nobility, but condemned by the
Universities and seriously frowned upon by many ecclesiastics), yet he was
never officially declared a heretic, and despite a few close calls was never
really persecuted. Even today, there is a disagreement among the scholars and
intellectuals whether Rabelais, a Franciscan, and later Benedictine monk, was
an eccentric yet religious free-spirited Christian humanist, or an immoral
iconoclastic atheist, and all that it entailed. The evidence for either verdict
is highly inconclusive, and probably such a verdict is totally unnecessary in
the first place…
...After all, nobody disputes the
fact that Rabelais was a bona fide genius of the first order.
So, long live the Renaissance and
its free-thinking life-loving humanistic heroes!
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