Injured Erofeev and invisible Vysotsky

The publishing house "Vita Nova" has published the next edition of Venedikt Erofeev's poem "Moscow-Petushki". The publication is not quite ordinary. Nowadays books can be either expensive or very cheap. There is no middle ground as a class, but if a book is published by Vita Nova, then it is not just a very expensive book - it is necessarily a gift copy, from the category “like on the shelf of a Sorbonne professor.” Venedikt Erofeev’s inclusion on the “professor’s shelf” is already surprising. What do they usually publish in such publishing houses and series that do not skimp on design? What can lay claim to nobility and sophistication, that is, the appearance of “Ruslan and Lyudmila” in an extremely expensive form, is quite predictable, and the publication of, say, Daria Dontsova’s novel with color engravings would look extremely strange. Of course, high cost in itself does not indicate the quality of literature - some work by Lydia Charskaya can also acquire a gold edge. But Charskaya’s books acquire a pseudo-elitism thanks to - how can I put it more precisely - “the patina of the times.”

The case of Venedikt Erofeev is special. On the one hand, he is a priori a classic, this, in general, is not subject to discussion. Like Erofeev’s classic, it seems that it can be printed in a special edition, at a special price, with gorgeous illustrations, comments, etc. However, the whole world of his heroes is so marginal that if someone had previously come up with the idea of ​​publishing it in velvet binding with gold embossing, it would have looked like a strange joke, like a mockery of the same heroes. And now almost such a publication, albeit without a velvet binding, but with gorgeous illustrations and comments, comes out. The unforgettable poem of Venedikt Erofeev has imperceptibly become covered with the ennobling patina of times. The life of alcoholics and marginalized people, which he spoke about, is now perceived with some kind of love and nostalgia even by those who have no idea how to clean polish and have never seen either Zubrovka or Koriandrova. That alcoholic discourse, those alcoholic realities that Erofeev wrote about are largely a thing of the past. The point is not even that it is now “not fashionable to drink” - they drink in Russia no less than under Venedikt Vasilyevich. But, so to speak, the aesthetics of drinking have changed radically. Along with state industry, the proletarian background that stood behind the purification of BF polish and glue also disappeared. It is not drunkenness that causes nostalgia, but precisely this very way of life that can be discerned behind drunkenness - a strange combination of the ethics of idleness and the cult of work that reigned in the late USSR. Actually, the comments of Alexei Plutser-Sarno, called the “Encyclopedia of Russian Drunkenness”: they are also not only and not so much about drunkenness as such, but about that specific ethical world of the Soviet person.

Plutser's comments deserve a separate discussion. Nowadays, if Plutser is known, it is not so much as a philologist, a specialist in Russian obscene vocabulary, and a compiler of a dictionary of Russian obscenities, but as an ideologist and inspirer of the actions of the art group “War” (Plutser dedicated the commentary to his colleagues from the group). The author’s “combat” past could not help but affect his work—Plutser’s ultra-radical worldview is more than noticeable in the comments. And yet, only such a worldview allows us to understand something important not so much even in the poem itself, but in our attitude towards it today. For Plutser, the alcoholic oblivion and unconsciousness of the hero of the poem is a symptom of the era - the best description of the trauma that the entire secular society experienced: the forced amnesia into which Soviet people were immersed. Moreover, if memory is forbidden, the past is forbidden, and the future seems to have already arrived, then a person is actually left with only the eternal, imperishable present: the day of the Soviet man is Groundhog Day. Immersion in the eternal present explains a lot in life at that time: hence, in particular, the tradition of drinking “everything to the last”, such a Russian potlatch. You can “empty your pockets” without thinking not only about how to live the next few days, but even about how to get drunk after such copious libations - after all, the future will never come. But if the Soviet world, as Erofeev describes it, is a trauma, then what is the modern reader nostalgic about? The modern, post-Soviet reader is nostalgic for the trauma of timelessness. He - this reader - is also traumatized, traumatized by the sudden and turbulent story. In his consciousness and subconscious, one trauma displaces another, it makes the previous trauma desirable, just as sherry was desirable for Venichka, and stigmata for St. Teresa. However, nostalgia for unconsciousness does not mean that we actually remember the Soviet past. We live in an era of “memory”, and nothing more. The past is still closed to us; we are still unable to comprehend it holistically.

There is a strange phenomenon: the legacy of many authors who were incredibly popular in the USSR and are still popular today is not being rethought in any way. I'm not talking about crowds of imitators and epigones, but about elementary philological research at the level of simply identifying contexts. Emptiness and silence. There are many such non-existent authors. For example, Leonid Solovyov, whose stories about Khoja Nasreddin were read in the USSR, has not been studied at all. But in the tradition of the Soviet picaresque novel, Solovyov’s books occupy a place almost comparable to the dilogy of I. Ilf and E. Petrov about Ostap Bender, or “The Unusual Adventures of Juleo Jurenito” by I. Ehrenburg. Another example, however, is less obvious: the prose writer and poet B. Mariengof, revered primarily by intellectuals, for some reason remains for literary scholars mainly a friend of S. Yesenin. In the late USSR there were also plenty of such “invisible” writers for researchers. How are the texts of Vladimir Vysotsky or Leonid Filatov reinterpreted? - no way. Their works are not analyzed, but they themselves become, like the figures of the authors, especially V. Vysotsky, symbols of that past and now desired trauma of unconsciousness and timelessness. Maybe that’s why a biographical film about a poet turns out to be almost an ode to the KGB.

Moreover, next to the “misunderstood” writers, there are also completely “understood” ones. So many works of literary criticism are published about I. Brodsky in a year than there are on Vysotsky in 10 years. Venedikt Erofeev is more of an “understood” writer. His texts (fortunately he wrote little) are studied most diligently. Thoughtful researchers of Venedikt Erofeev’s work have not compared with which works, which writers and non-writers. E. Lesin, for example, in addition to the curious parallels between the heroes of Venedikt Erofeev and Andrei Platonov, found that Erofeev had something in common with N. Nosov. Moreover, even the author of these lines, without hesitation, decided to somehow compare “Hedgehog in the Fog” by Yu. Norshtein with the poem “Moscow-Petushki”, and he also found similarities! “Moscow-Petushki” also seems to no longer need new comments: before Plutser-Sarno, the poem had already been commented on twice - by Yuri Levin and Eduard Vlasov. And here is the paradox, when explaining one of the most studied authors - Venedikt Erofeev, Plutser most often refers to the texts of the author of the least studied - Vysotsky. A paradox that once again emphasizes the existence of some strange voids in Russian literary criticism.

By the way, about previous comments: naturally, Plutzer-Sarno pays some attention to his predecessors. He crushed Yuri Levin’s commentary almost completely. In general, as the heir of the Tartu school, Plutser treats its representatives quite like his own. For example, he might casually make fun of a “professor on the state salary” (M.Yu. Lotman). They say that only based on his unenviable financial situation, he could assume that his neighbors, the nobles, could reproach Eugene Onegin for extravagance because of such a trifle as expensive wines. Plutser-Sarno treats E. Vlasov with much greater reverence than his colleagues in Tartu, and even apologizes for having to criticize him. Vlasov’s remarks, originally published in Japan in 1998 with the title “A Writer’s Companion,” are not comments at all, but “free literary marginalia of an erudite who did not set out to create a scientific work,” and therefore it is not possible to demand accuracy and academicism from them quite appropriate. But still, for the sake of order, Plutser also scolds Vlasov. Plutser is mainly dissatisfied with two things. Firstly, inappropriate commenting on curse words. Here Plutser is completely in his element, his comments are legitimate, although, of course, an ordinary user of Russian swearing, and not such a deep connoisseur and researcher of it as Plutser-Sarno, and Vlasov’s brief explanations will be quite satisfying. Another important aspect that angers Plutser-Sarno: the discrepancy between the information provided by Vlasov and the exact recipe for alcoholic beverages from the times of the USSR. Let’s say, “Zubrovka” contained not 30% alcohol, but 40%,” etc. In general, as follows from the title “Encyclopedia of Russian Drunkenness,” a significant place is devoted to the alcoholic topic in Plutser’s comments, and this even produces some comic effect ( which, probably, the author was counting on). On the one hand, Plutser behaves as a respectable researcher, “penetrating the text and revealing the endless perspective of meanings,” appealing to the tradition of commentary-research, the founder of which he considers G. G. Shpet. On the other hand , this academic researcher suddenly begins to provide information (gathered, as you might guess, from personal experience), for example, about the taste of Chypre cologne.This combination of the roles of the outcast and the intellectual is quite consistent with the style of the poem itself, but cannot help but make you laugh.

In addition to Plutser’s comments, the publication has two more advantages: firstly, good, ironic illustrations by Vasily Golubev. Golubev was a member of the Mitki artists’ association, and one might assume that the “Mitkovsky” style would be close to Erofeev, but there is not much “Mitkovsky” in his drawings. Creating an atmosphere “albeit fragrant, but familiar,” not so much the atmosphere of the work, but of the era in general, Golubev starts not from the text as a whole, but from individual fragments, even phrases, or the absence thereof. Thus, the chapter “Sickle and Hammer - Karacharovo,” consisting of the phrase “And immediately drank” and empty space, as if hiding “a terrible multi-story battle,” is illustrated by a piece of paper with crossed out and unreadable words. For “recreating the atmosphere” of an era, this principle (illustrating not the text, but its details) is really suitable, and most importantly, Golubev managed to show the loss and, I can’t find another expression, the lyrical restlessness of the main character, and this is a very difficult task.

Additional bonuses for connoisseurs of Erofeev - a biography of the writer compiled by the director of the Khibiny Literary Museum V.V. Erofeeva - Evgeniy Stahl. The chronicle was already published in 2005, but, frankly speaking, not in the most prominent publication - the almanac "Living Arctic", published in the city of Appatity. So there is still a possibility that Venedikt Erofeev’s admirer is still not familiar with her.
Well, as if to confirm my thesis about nostalgia for unconsciousness, the book also contains a collection of Soviet wine labels. To completely exhaust the topic of Soviet drunkenness.