Молодой богач: избранные рассказы

УДК 
372.8
ББК 
81.2 Англ-93
 
Ф 66

ISBN 978-5-9925-0664-8

Фицджеральд Ф. С.
Ф 66 
Молодой богач. Избранные рассказы: Книга 
для чтения на английском языке. — СПб.: КАРО, 
2011. — 384 с. — (“Classical Literature”).

ISBN 978-5-9925-0664-8.

Наряду с романами «Ночь нежна», «Великий Гэтсби», «Последний магнат» Ф. С. Фицджеральд (1896–1940) известен 
своими рассказами, которые вошли в золотой фонд американской новеллистики.
Неадаптированный текст снабжен комментариями и словарем. Книга адресована студентам языковых вузов и всех любителей американской литературы.

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2010

ОБ АВТОРЕ

«Это был американский писатель, который писал в начале двадцатых годов двадцатого века и позже, и некоторое 
время жил в Париже и за границей. Он написал две очень 
хорошие книги и одну не закончил, но те, кто хорошо знает 
его творчество, говорят, что она была бы очень хорошей. 
Кроме того, он написал несколько хороших рассказов», — 
написал Эрнест Хемингуэй о Фрэнсисе Скотте Фицджеральде через четырнадцать лет после его смерти.
Писатель родился 24 сентября 1896 года в г. Сент-Поле, 
штат Миннесота. Какое-то время учился в Принстоне, затем ушел в армию, но на фронте не бывал. Демобилизовался 
в 1919 году, поступил на работу в рекламное агентство, сочинял рассказы, стихи, тексты к песням, скетчи и киносценарии. В 1920 году вышел его первый роман «По эту сторону рая», имевший большой успех. В том же году Фицджеральд женился на дочери судьи штата Алабама Зельде Сейр, 
с которой они вели шикарный образ жизни на европейских 
курортах. Однажды он сказал: «Не знаю, реальные ли мы с 
Зельдой люди или персонажи одного из моих романов». За 
первой книгой последовали произведения «Прекрасные, 
но обреченные» (1922) и «Великий Гэтсби» (1925) — роман, 
который многие критики, да и сам Фицджеральд, считают 
шедевром американской литературы. В авторитетном оксфордском списке «Сто главных книг столетия» этот ро

ОБ АВТОРЕ

ман обогнал «В поисках утраченного времени» Марселя 
Пруста и занял второе место, уступив только «Улиссу» 
Джойса. В эти годы также было написано много рассказов, с помощью которых Фицджеральд зарабатывал деньги, чтобы обеспечить свой роскошный образ жизни.
Последнее законченное произведение Фицджеральда — 
роман «Ночь нежна», в котором автор пытается проанализировать обратную сторону своей внешне красивой 
жизни, а также выразить горечь, вызванную меркантильной моралью. Писатель назвал это произведение своей 
исповедью. Критика и читатели этот роман не приняли. 
Америке нужны были Хемингуэй и Фолкнер.
Последние годы жизни писателя были очень тяжелыми. Зельда страдала шизофренией, сам он много пил, 
печатали его мало. Позднее творчество Фицджеральда 
публика не смогла оценить по достоинству. В декабря 
1940 года он скончался от сердечного приступа в Калифор нии. Внезапная смерть прервала работу над романом 
о Голливуде «Последний магнат».
И, как это нередко бывает, после смерти писателя произошла переоценка ценностей — его возвели в ранг классиков американской литературы ХХ века.

THE RICH BOY

I

Begin with an individual, and before you know it 
you fi nd that you have created a type; begin with a 
type, and you fi nd that you have created — nothing. 
Th at is because we are all queer fi sh, queerer behind 
our faces and voices than we want any one to know 
or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaim ing himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I 
feel pretty sure that he has some defi nite and perhaps 
terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal — 
and his protestation of being average and honest and 
open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.
Th ere are no types, no plurals. Th ere is a rich boy, 
and this is his and not his brothers’ story. All my life 
I have lived among his brothers but this one has been 
my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I 
should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the 

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

6

poor have told about the rich and the rich have told 
about themselves — such a wild structure they have 
erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, 
some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the 
intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made 
the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
Let me tell you about the very rich. They are 
diff erent from you and me. Th ey possess and enjoy 
early, and it does something to them, makes them soft  
where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, 
in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very 
diffi  cult to understand. Th ey think, deep in their 
hearts, that they are better than we are because we had 
to discover the compensations and refuges of life for 
ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world 
or sink below us, they still think that they are better 
than we are. Th ey are diff erent. Th e only way I can 
describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as 
if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point 
of view. If I accept this for a moment I am lost — I have 
nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

II

Anson was the eldest of six children who would 
some day divide a fortune of fi ft een million dollars, 
and he reached the age of reason — is it seven?— at 

THE RICH BOY

7

the beginning of the century when daring young 
women were already gliding along Fift h Avenue in 
electric “mobiles.” In those days he and his brother 
had an English governess who spoke the language very 
clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew 
to speak as she did — their words and sentences were 
all crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. 
Th ey didn’t talk exactly like English children but 
acquired an accent that is peculiar to fashionable 
people in the city of New York.
In the summer the six children were moved from 
the house on 71st Street to a big estate in northern 
Connecticut. It was not a fashionable locality — 
Anson’s father wanted to delay as long as possible his 
children’s knowledge of that side of life. He was a man 
somewhat superior to his class, which composed New 
York society, and to his period, which was the snobbish 
and formalized vulgarity of the Gilded Age1, and he 
wanted his sons to learn habits of concentration and 
have sound constitutions and grow up into right-living 
and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on 

1 Gilded Age — «Позолоченный век» (по названию 
романа М. Твена и Ч. Уорнера), саркастическое название периода с конца Гражданской войны до примерно 
1880 г., для которого были характерны быстрый рост 
экономики и численности населения, а также стремительное обогащение некоторых промышленников и 
коррумпированность политики и бизнеса

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

8

them as well as they were able until the two older boys 
went away to school, but in huge establishments this 
is diffi  cult — it was much simpler in the series of small 
and medium-sized houses in which my own youth 
was spent — I was never far out of the reach of my 
mother’s voice, of the sense of her presence, her 
approval or disapproval.
Anson’s fi rst sense of his superiority came to him 
when he realized the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the Connecticut village. 
Th e parents of the boys he played with always inquired 
aft er his father and mother, and were vaguely excited 
when their own children were asked to the Hunters’ 
house. He accepted this as the natural state of things, 
and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he 
was not the center — in money, in position, in 
authority — remained with him for the rest of his life. 
He disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence — he expected it to be given him freely, and 
when it wasn’t he withdrew into his family. His family 
was suffi  cient, for in the East money is still a somewhat 
feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish 
West, money separates families to form “sets.”
At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson 
was tall and thick-set, with a clear complexion and a 
healthy color from the ordered life he had led in 
school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way 
on his head, his nose was beaked — these two things 

THE RICH BOY

9

kept him from being handsome — but he had a 
confi dent charm and a certain brusque style, and the 
upper-class men who passed him on the street knew 
without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone 
to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very 
superiority kept him from being a success in college — 
the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the 
refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe 
seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before 
he graduated, he began to shift  the center of his life to 
New York.
He was at home in New York — there was his own 
house with “the kind of servants you can’t get any 
more”— and his own family, of which, because of his 
good humor and a certain ability to make things go, 
he was rapidly becoming the center, and the débutante 
parties, and the correct manly world of the men’s clubs, 
and the occasional wild spree with the gallant girls 
whom New Haven only knew from the fi ft h row1. His 
aspirations were conventional enough — they included 
even the irreproachable shadow he would some day 
marry, but they diff ered from the aspirations of the 
majority of young men in that there was no mist over 

1 and the occasional wild spree with the gallant girls 
whom New Haven only knew from the fi ft h row — и ино-
гда бесшабашные кутежи с лихими девчонками, о которых в Нью-Хейвене знали лишь понаслышке

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

10

them, none of that quality which is variously known 
as “idealism” or “illusion.” Anson accepted without 
reservation the world of high finance and high 
extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery 
and of privilege. Most of our lives end as a compromise — it was as a compromise that his life began.
He and I fi rst met in the late summer of 1917 when 
he was just out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was 
swept up into the systematized hysteria of the war. In 
the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation he came 
down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played 
“I’m sorry, dear,” and we young offi  cers danced with 
the girls. Every one liked him, and though he ran with 
the drinkers and wasn’t an especially good pilot, even 
the instructors treated him with a certain respect. He 
was always having long talks with them in his confi dent, logical voice — talks which ended by his getting 
himself, or, more frequently, another offi  cer, out of 
some impending trouble. He was convivial, bawdy, 
robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all surprised 
when he fell in love with a conservative and rather 
proper girl.
Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious 
beauty from somewhere in California. Her family kept 
a winter residence just outside of town, and in spite 
of her primness she was enormously popular; there is 
a large class of men whose egotism can’t endure humor 
in a woman. But Anson wasn’t that sort, and I couldn’t