Флэшман: Ұзын өмірлі антигерой тарихы

Sir Harry Paget Flashman is a fictional character created by Thomas Hughes (1822–1896) in the semi autobiographical Tom Brown's School Days (1857) and later developed by George MacDonald Fraser (1925–2008). Harry Flashman appears in a series of 12 of Fraser's books, collectively known as The Flashman Papers, with covers illustrated by Arthur Barbosa and Gino D’Achille. Flashman was played by Malcolm McDowell in the Richard Lester 1975 film Royal Flash. In Tom Brown's School Days (1857), Flashman is portrayed as a notorious Rugby School bully who persecutes Tom Brown and is finally expelled for drunkenness, at which point he simply disappears. Fraser decided to write the story of Flashman's later life, in which the school bully would be identified as an "illustrious Victorian soldier", experiencing many of the 19th century wars and adventures of the British Empire and rising to high rank in the British Army, to be acclaimed as a great warrior, while still remaining "a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady." In the papers – which are purported to have been written by Flashman and discovered only after his death – he describes his own dishonourable conduct with complete candour. Fraser's Flashman is an antihero who often runs away from danger. Nevertheless, through a combination of luck and cunning, he usually ends each volume acclaimed as a hero.

Fraser gave Flashman a lifespan from 1822 to 1915 and a birth date of 5 May. He also provided Flashman's first and middle names, as Hughes's novel had given Flashman only one, using the names to make an ironic allusion to Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey. Paget was one of the heroes of Waterloo, who cuckolded the Duke of Wellington's brother Henry Wellesley and later—in one of the period's more celebrated scandals—married Lady Anglesey, after Wellesley had divorced her for adultery. In Flashman, Flashman says that his great grandfather, Jack Flashman, made the family fortune in America, trading in rum, slaves and "piracy too, I shouldn't wonder". Despite their wealth, the Flashmans "were never the thing"; Flashman quotes the diarist Henry Greville's comment that "the coarse streak showed through, generation after generation, like dung beneath a rosebush". Harry Flashman's equally fictional father, Henry Buckley Flashman, appears in Black Ajax (1997). Buckley, a bold young officer in the British cavalry, is said to have been wounded in action at Talavera in 1809, and then to have gained access to "society" by sponsoring bare knuckle boxer Tom Molineaux (the first black man to contend for a championship). The character subsequently marries Flashman's mother Lady Alicia Paget, a fictional relation of the real Marquess of Anglesey. Buckley, it is related, also served as a Member of Parliament (MP) but was "sent to the knacker's yard at Reform". Beside politics, the older Flashman character has interests including drinking, fox hunting (riding to hounds), and women.

Flashman is a large man, 6 feet (2 m) tall and close to 13 stone (about 180 pounds or 82 kg). In Flashman and the Tiger, he mentions that one of his grandchildren has black hair and eyes, resembling him in his younger years. His dark colouring frequently enabled him to pass (in disguise) for a Pashtun. He claims only three natural talents: horsemanship, facility with foreign languages, and fornication. He becomes an expert cricket bowler, but only through hard effort (he needed sporting credit at Rugby School, and feared to play rugby football). He can also display a winning personality when he wants to, and is very skilled at flattering those more important than himself without appearing servile. As he admits in the Papers, Flashman is a coward, who will flee from danger if there is any way to do so, and has on some occasions collapsed in funk. He has one great advantage in concealing this weakness: when he is frightened, his face turns red, rather than white, so that observers think he is excited, enraged, or exuberant—as a hero ought to be. After his expulsion from Rugby School for drunkenness, the young Flashman looks for an easy life. He has his wealthy father buy him an officer's commission in the fashionable 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons. The 11th, commanded by Lord Cardigan, later involved in the Charge of the Light Brigade, has just returned from India and are not likely to be posted abroad soon. Flashman throws himself into the social life that the 11th offered and becomes a leading light of Canterbury society. In 1840 the regiment is converted to Hussars with an elegant blue and crimson uniform, which assists Flashman in attracting female attention for the remainder of his military career. A duel with another officer over a French courtesan leads to his being temporarily stationed in Paisley, Scotland. There he meets and deflowers Elspeth Morrison, daughter of a wealthy textile manufacturer, whom he has to marry in a "shotgun wedding" under threat of a horsewhipping by her uncle. But marriage to the daughter of a mere businessman forces his transferral from the snobbish 11th Hussars. He is sent to India to make a career in the army of the East India Company. Unfortunately, his language talent and his habit of flattery bring him to the attention of the Governor General. The Governor does him the (very much unwanted) favour of assigning him as aide to General Elphinstone in Afghanistan. Flashman survives the ensuing retreat from Kabul (the worst British military debacle of Victoria's reign) by a mixture of sheer luck and unstinting cowardice. He becomes an unwitting hero: the defender of Piper's Fort, where he is the only surviving white man, and is found by the relieving troops clutching the flag and surrounded by enemy dead. Of course, Flashman had arrived at the fort by accident, collapsed in terror rather than fighting, been forced to stand and show fight by his subordinate, and is 'rumbled' for a complete coward. He had been trying to surrender the colours, not defend them. Happily for him, all inconvenient witnesses had been killed. This incident sets the tone for Flashman's life. Over the following 60 years or so, he is involved in many of the major military conflicts of the 19th century—always in spite of his best efforts to evade his duty. He is often selected for especially dangerous jobs because of his heroic reputation. He meets many famous people, and survives some of the worst military disasters of the period (the First Anglo Afghan War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Cawnpore, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Battle of Isandlwana), always coming out with more heroic laurels. The date of his last adventure seems to have been around 1900, being involved in the Boxer Rebellion alongside US Marines. He dies in 1915. Despite his admitted cowardice, Flashman is a dab hand at fighting when he has to. Though he dodges danger as much as he can, and runs away when no one is watching, after the Piper's Fort incident, he usually controls his fear and often performs bravely. Almost every book contains one or more incidents where Flashman has to fight or perform some other daring action, and he holds up long enough to complete it. For instance, he is ordered to accompany the Light Brigade on its famous charge and rides all the way to the Russian guns. However, most of these acts of 'bravery' are performed only when he has absolutely no choice and to do anything else would result in his being exposed as a coward and losing his respected status in society, or being shot for desertion. When he can act like a coward with impunity, he invariably does. Flashman surrenders to fear in front of witnesses only a few times, and is never caught out again. During the siege of Piper's Fort, in the first novel, Flashman cowers weeping in his bed at the start of the final assault; the only witness to this dies before relief comes. He breaks down while accompanying Rajah Brooke during a battle with pirates, but the noise drowns out his blubbering, and he recovers enough to command a storming party of sailors (placing himself right in the middle of the party, to avoid stray bullets). After the Charge of the Light Brigade, he flees in panic from the fighting in the battery—but mistakenly charges into an entire Russian regiment, adding to his heroic image. In spite of his numerous character flaws, Flashman is represented as being a perceptive observer of his times ("I saw further than most in some ways"). In its obituary of George MacDonald Fraser, The Economist commented that realistic sharp sightedness ("if not much else") was an attribute Flashman shared with his creator.

In 1975, Malcolm McDowell played Harry Flashman in Royal Flash, directed by Richard Lester.

It is unclear whether Hughes or Fraser was aware of it, but the first occurrence of the name "Flashman" in fiction comes from the 2nd century, as an emissary of the Sun in Lucian's narrative A True Story. In the Jackson Speed Memoirs, Robert Peecher borrows heavily from George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman in creating the Jackson Speed character. Like Flashman, Speed is a womanizer and a coward who is undeservedly marked as a hero by those around him. Peecher also adopts the literary device used by Fraser of the "discovered" memoirs. Unlike the English Flashman, Speed is an American making appearances in the Mexican–American War, the U. S. Civil War, and other American conflicts of the 19th century. Writer Keith Laidler gave the Flashman story a new twist in The Carton Chronicles by revealing that Flashman is the natural son of Sydney Carton, hero of the Charles Dickens classic A Tale of Two Cities. Laidler has Sydney Carton changing his mind at the foot of the guillotine, escaping death and making wayward and amorous progress through the terrors of the French Revolution, during which time he spies for both the British and French, causes Danton's death, shoots Robespierre, and reminisces on a liaison among the hayricks at the "Leicestershire pile" of a married noblewoman, who subsequently gave birth to a boy—Flashman—on 5 May 1822. Sandy Mitchell's Warhammer 40,000 character Commissar Ciaphas Cain is partially inspired by Flashman. In comics, writer John Ostrander took Flashman as his model for his portrayal of the cowardly villain Captain Boomerang in the Suicide Squad series. In the letters page to the last issue in the series (#66), Ostrander acknowledges this influence directly. Flashman's success with the ladies is noticeably lacking in the Captain Boomerang character. In Kim Newman's alternative history novel The Bloody Red Baron (part of the Anno Dracula series), Flashman is cited as an example of a dishonourable officer in a character's internal monologue. In the later novella Aquarius (set in 1968, one year before the first volume of the Flashman Papers was published), it is mentioned that the fictional St Bartolph's College at the University of London had previously been home to the Harry Paget Flashman Refectory, until its recent renaming to Che Guevara Hall in an attempt to pacify campus activists. Flashman's portrait (unnamed, but with unmistakable background and characteristics) hangs in the home of the protagonist of The Peshawar Lancers, an alternative history novel by S. M. Stirling: the family claims to have had an ancestor who held Piper's Fort, as Flashman did; the protagonist claims his sole talents are for horsemanship and languages and has an Afghan in his service named "Ibrahim Khan" (cf. Ilderim Khan, Flashman's Afghan blood brother and servant); late in the book, he plays with Elias the Jew on a "black jade chess set" matching the description of the one Flashman stole from the Summer Palace in Flashman and the Dragon; the book's chief antagonist is named Ignatieff, a reference to Flashman's Russian nemesis Nikolai Ignatieff. Another allusion to Flashman by Stirling occurs in his short story "The Charge of Lee's Brigade", which appeared in the alternative history anthology Alternate Generals (1998, ed. by Harry Turtledove). Here, Sir Robert E. Lee is a British general in the Crimean War who orders an officer, obviously Flashman (cherrypicker trousers, rides like a Comanche in battle), to take part in a better planned Charge of the Light Brigade. Flashman dies in the attack, demonstrating some courage despite what Lee perceives only as nervousness. So, in this version Flashman again ends up a hero. But—as he himself would have been quick to point out—he is a dead hero. Terry Pratchett was a fan of the Flashman series and the Discworld character Rincewind is an inveterate coward with a talent for languages who is always running away from danger, but nevertheless through circumstance emerges with the appearance of an unlikely hero, for which reason he is then selected for further dangerous enterprises. In this he strongly resembles Flashman, although he is totally dissimilar in most other aspects. The word "Rince" means an object that moves quickly so "Rincewind" may be a play on the name the Apache gave to Flashman which was shortened to "Windbreaker" from the full "White Rider Goes So Fast He Destroys the Wind with His Speed". The Discworld novel Pyramids has a character named Fliemoe, the bully at the Ankh Morpork Assassins' Guild school, who is a parody of the original version of Flashman from Tom Brown's Schooldays (including "toasting" new boys). In the Assassins' Guild Yearbook and Diary, Fliemoe is described as having grown up to be "an unbelievable liar and an unsuccessful bully". His name is a play on that of Flashman's crony Speedicut—both "Speedicut" and "Flymo" are brand names of lawn mowers. An editorial piece in the 14 May 2011 edition of The Guardian newspaper on the subject of British Prime Minister David Cameron being labelled a "Flashman" was given a Harry Flashman by line and was written in the style of Flashman's narrative. Flashman's son, Harry II, is used as a character in some of the short stories created for the "Tales of the Shadowmen" series. He first appeared in the eighth volume. His son has several of the characteristics of his father, but appears to be less a coward. Flashman appears as a minor character in the novel Dickens of the Mounted by Eric Nicol. This novel is a fictionalized account of Francis Dickens and, like the Flashman books, is written in the form of a discovered memoir. Flashman is a character in Snooks North and South and Snooks The Presidents' Man by Peter Brian. The protagonist of these books is Snooks, who is another character from Tom Brown's School Days. In Brian's books, Snooks participates in the American Civil War under disreputable circumstances and conceals his identity by using Harry Flashman's name. So the events that would be attributed to Flashman actually occurred to Snooks. There is a card for Flashman in Pax Pamir, a board game about the Great Game. In the first Flashman novel, he is in Afghanistan for the First Anglo Afghan War and participates in the British retreat from Kabul. Comic artist Mike Dorey created the character ‘Cadman the Fighting Coward’ for The Victor (comics) who was based on Flashman. Gerald Cadman, originally of Prince Rupert’s Horse “The Fighting 43rd”, was a cowardly and dishonest officer during the first world war. Like Flashman his cowardice did not stop him from winning many medals, including the Victoria Cross, the DSO, MC and various foreign decorations, none of which he deserved.