Where are you, my paradise?

Is there a return ticket from death? About the novel by Alexander Tender "Psychopr"

The last novel by Alexander the Tender Psychopr (M.: “At the Nikitsky Gate”, 2023), the epigraph from “overcoming self -evidence” of Leo Shestov, which also says: “Is there death - death - life - life”. For the protagonist of the novel, the funeral agent Mark Pitovranov, the great secret of life and death acquires special acuteness also because he is endowed with the unique ability to hear and understand the dead. Death, he realizes, is a different form of life, with death our life does not end, it only enters a new, still unknown being to it. Gradually, Mark comes to the conclusion that “a dead man is much better than himself, temporarily alive. He is cleaner. It is not subject to vain impulses, stupid addictions, low passions. The freed soul with a sad smile looks at the abandoned body, the source of suffering and errors, sins and mistakes - at the gaping emptiness where a great understanding would have to live. ”

Mark's father Lolli Pitovranov is a writer who is bitterly aware of the limitation of his talent, painfully experiencing the death of his beloved wife and reflecting on life and death with a longing for a deeply disappointed person. “Where are you, my paradise? Do not stick your head out of the window with a jam day and do not disclose the frosty air with a helpless question, what is the millennium in the yard now. My precious. Take care of yourself. Is it all the same as expelled from paradise to a person, at what times to live his short life? ”

Mark held on to the sent, it seemed to him from above. If it does not lose its chastity, then one day it will be in the other world. Walk out of the immortality of the soul and will return back. This innate curiosity is fraught with tragedy. The girl Olya, his bride, should wait for the promised return.

The promise was sent to him under mystical circumstances, which Olya did not believe, considering them an obsession. She, the future wife, whom he loves selflessly. She wants his intimacy, earthly, hot, incomprehensible, and he hides behind the voices "from there." (“Only the virginity until then retain,” the mysterious voice inspired him, “then you will go up and go out.” To look into otherwise life - this was his highest goal. “Is it really more important to you than you and I?” Olya breaks.

But knowledge about otherworldly life is not available to us. Science just opened the living symptoms of dead and reanimated patients. Religious revelations are available, but they do not claim anthropomorphic phenomena that were drawn in the imagination.

The secret of the incomprehensible is replenished by Christian faith. But not absolutely. Is it possible to understand why the Lord created the universe and man in it? .. It is impossible to understand. But you can trust his good plan. In the brand, the symptom of Thomas an unbeliever is revealed, who wanted to make a touch to the continuation of life. Mark admits: something “does not allow me to believe me completely. The soul does not trust Vera. "

Mark was born in a country, stupefied by atheism. For several years of relative freedom, little has changed in the worldview of compatriots. In this assessment, he agrees with Lollium, who, protecting democracy, in the days of the coup was with a few defenders in the White House. He is frank with his son: “Danide, my unhappy people, for even those who did not execute the innocent are still involved in their death”, “Why is it so nauseous to live in Russia?”, “Yes, it is lost, this is the state, if it tramples a person into street mud.”

There is a detective plot in the novel - a small story about a millionaire Sergei Karandin, who killed his own father for the sake of money.

The father was very rich, hid Baul with a dough in the underground in the country. “He saved money exclusively to make it more.” The absurd logic of modern Plyushkin, but where with more brutal appetites. He, according to his son, "as a malignant tumor on the body of life, deserves removal." And the hired killers decided his father.

Evil gives birth to evil. The son has to hide from the once hired killers, they now encroach on his wealth. And he - regularly reading the Holy Scriptures, by the way, the connoisseur of ancient icons - chooses innocent protection. Buy a funeral and bury yourself fictitiously so that the ends are in the water, in the ground. Fake funerals. There was a corpse in the morgue - an unidentified homeless person who was picked up on the street. He was buried instead of quaras. And Mark, an agent of the funeral bureau "Eternity", participates in this gloomy performance. Why?

Olya was in trouble, a friend made her in the spread of drugs.

The investigator set the price: 50 thousand dollars - and Olya will be exempted. She faces a prison term on the eve of their wedding - 10 years. Money was paid by the “deceased”, who was safely captured and buried.

The text "Psycho" is dense in meaning; Associative fields, sometimes very vast, do not dissipate it, do not open. Even graphically, it is ingrained for many pages. Without paragraphs, without quotes in dialogues and monologues. Long periods are linked by direct and indirect speech. The author is present in the text as one of the heroes. He communicates with them and with the reader, reflecting on the course of events, deepening the characters.

Rich language. Nizova slang gets along with theological terminology, with an exalted dictionary, nurtured on the basis of world culture. What is affected in the art palette - in rich excursions and lyrical digressions. The glare of Russian history, its unlucky lessons are alarmed. Alexander Tender, justifying his fiction - perhaps excessive, - recalls Dostoevsky: "There is nothing fantastic more Russian reality."

The novel is permeated, and it is better to say that he breathes on many pages with inconsolable pain. All heroes are traumatized in one way or another, but not everyone feels it ... Not everyone is aware. And only in the brand is the path to another reality that encourages it is built. The path, unfortunately, is naive ... fabulous.

And finally, humor - he stuck the whole narrative with a harsh thread, manifested by comic scenes, replicas. I remembered the lines of the poet unknown in the Soviet Union: “Without a humor, I probably would not have survived a day in the Council of State.” The last chapter, which is a prologue, as if pretend to retroactively dramatic events from an outrageous height. It is written in the style of a fascinating grotesque. Mark in a dream (after which he does not wake up) enters the afterlife. “Before us is the seventh sky, where, on the Thrones sparkling with precious stones, God Savaof with long ones sits - to the shoulders, white, like snow, hair and the same snow -white beard.”

He walks on the clouds. He is surrounded by cherubs, "Seraphims, singing, egregatively, appealing and verbal:" Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord Savaof. " An exclamation from the Orthodox Eucharistic prayer. Lucifer, Gabriel are busy with his own business.

Gabriel echoes Savaof, preoccupied with a decline in morality among people. “Bitter truth, your omnipotence. How morality fell! Neither your parental blessing, nor a paradise branch, nor field chamomile. Immediately in the bed. (Shakes his head.) Something needs to be done, your omnipotence, otherwise they will all go out there. ” Hell and all his unfortunate inhabitants are represented: Lenin, Zemlyok, Stalin, Blokhin, the executioners of Auschwitz ... All of them, fried in fire, are quit in a bloody swamp.

Mark in the afterlife saw everything that seemed to humanity since ancient times. Savaof admits: “Ancient, as a world, the dream of people” - to visit here “and return. Get a ticket at the two ends, so to speak. Well, I myself endowed them with curiosity. "

But the brand, who made sure in his guesses, there, in a dream, the anxiety languishes, the fear of not returning to the father, to Olya, who believes in immortality without any guarantees.

And the bitter minute of his no return, his lifeless body in the arms of a stunned Olya is a sentence to doubting humanity.