Where the devil jokes and Gaster rules

Sergey Vasiliev

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The Booker final will bring surprises

All people of good will associated with literature remember that the coming fifth of December is not only the day of the Stalinist Constitution, but also the pre-set calendar date of the gala dinner, where, as the courses change, everyone will finally know the name of that favorite of the book race with obstacles, who from this day on will become richer by 12,500 US dollars.

We have already talked in previous issues about ordinary writers (Mikhail Berg, Nikolai Kononov, Andrei Korovin, Anatoly Korolev, Dmitry Lipskerov, Vikenty Pukhov, Olga Slavnikova, Nikolai Yakushev), and about “shortlist writers” (Valery Zalotukha, Nikolai Kononov, Alexey Slapovsky ). Mikhail Shishkin (along with Slapovsky, he is considered one of the most likely winners) spoke out himself.

But, as they say, never mind... What if the contender this time finally turns out to be not he, but she? After all, this year’s jury (excluding the fiction writer Galina Shcherbakova) is exclusively male, because they are all - the Publisher, the Critic, the Director, and the Poet - male, aren’t they? So why shouldn’t they be seduced by the exalted prose of Marina Paley, a Leningrad native now living in Holland? Or not be enchanted by the meticulous, apt and touching “life” of Svetlana Schönbrunn, who moved from Moscow to Israel in 1975?

It turns out that #4 of Volga magazine for this year, where Marina Paley was published, was published in a circulation of only 500, and not at all 800 copies, as we erroneously reported in the previous publication. And now it’s autumn, and he will most likely die completely, for which we congratulate the Saratov governor Ayatskov, on whose territory the starvation death of one of the best domestic literary periodicals, whose authors are known far beyond the Volga region, Russia, and are nominated for " Booker", and not just one at a time, but in batches.

So the novel “Lunch” by Marina Paley, who gained fame after the publication of the story “Cabiria from the Obvodny Canal” in the magazine “Znamya”, is obviously her best text to date and compares favorably with her boring and typically “emigrant” essay entitled “ Long Distance, or Slavic Accent”, published in “New World”, already published as a separate book and telling in the pretentious form of “script imitations” that they are not like us, that youth cannot be returned, life is difficult, the night is tender, and being rich and healthy is better than being poor and sick.

"Lunch", thank God, is not an "imitation", not a story, not a collection of stories stretched out to infinity, but rather a novel, and we strongly disagree with one of our respected colleagues, who in a newspaper review of the "Booker Six" wrote that these are “remnants of European modernism seventy years ago.” 2000 - 70 = 1930. There are still ten years before the war, and here is the collapse of human consciousness after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the Gulag, Chernobyl and perestroika, which gave the hero of the novel the freedom not to go to work, change wives, write a Treatise and at the end of the plot make himself hara-kiri with the help of a Japanese knife, whose “bluish blade is still slightly visible through the shuddering film.”

Although immediately (by the will of the writer who has not broken with humanism) this hero of our time, this same I (male) is suddenly reborn as a swimmer, shipwrecked and trying to climb out to an unknown shore.

What kind of “scraps” are there when this is a completely integral, energetically and skillfully woven fabric of so-called postmodernism, which, within the framework of cultural pluralism established in our literature, has the same right to exist as all other “isms”, including socialist realism and conceptualism, which relate to each other like totalitarian twinning antipodes. Here is a bizarre mixture of “Notes from the Underground”, “Notes of a Madman”, “Theatrical Novel”, “Moscow - Petushkov”, the stupidest anecdotes and highly wise maxims. From the book you can learn a lot of interesting things about culture, civilization, information, money, pacifism, Anton Chekhov, women, furniture, current politics, sound holes, mice, rats, parasite critics and ruthless moneybags who are even worse than communists.

Because these, and these, and in general all of us are ruled by Gaster - that same monstrous internal organ, “through which this inert control of living matter is carried out, which inevitably transforms into dead matter.” Well, Gaster, you don’t know, or what? This “insignificant gray bag suspended in the center of my body, wet, slimy, with two holes, at the entrance and exit, with caustic contents” and at the same time “an extra-social, and ultimately transmundane formation,” most likely “an extra-visual coelenterate organism that ", having energetic connections with the noosphere, also has the opposite effect on it."

As a result, a simple person, if he is not crazy and not an Artist, can only “degrade within the same system of mutually transforming meat.”

A madman commits hara-kiri, an artist writes a novel - that’s the whole difference between them, if you believe what is written, but how can you not believe what is written if it is written well? In literature, only those who write poorly lie, and everything else in works of art is always true. I wonder, though, whether this strange book was written in Leningrad, Saratov or Amsterdam? Life is so common now that you can’t guess it right away.

Why does it seem that “Roses and Chrysanthemums” by Svetlana Schönbrunn were not composed in the Holy Land, where today everyone, regardless of religious affiliation and citizenship, has a good chance of getting hit on the head with a stone, but somewhere in a quiet area of ​​the Moscow metro.” Airport" - the traditional habitat of official and dissident "engineers of human souls", beautifully depicted by Vladimir Voinovich in "Ivankiad" and the play "The Hat".

For this book is 32.68 in size. l. tells, as the blurb on the cover states, “about the life of the family of a Moscow writer. The action takes place at the end of the war and in the post-war years in the house of Pravda, the inhabitants of which are obsessed either with despair, or with vain dreams, or with hopes for Stalin’s prizes, or with horror of Stalin’s camps."

Most likely, in those years (1943-1951), which are mentioned in the book, the writers' quarter at the "Airport" had not yet been built. And Pravda, young people, was such a communist publishing house. In fact, it still exists now, it’s just called something differently, unlike the newspaper of the same name, where, by the way, when you were little, the current speaker of the State Duma, Comrade. Seleznev.

“The story of a generation that spent its childhood in evacuation and returned to Moscow with already matured souls, the generation from which the sixties came,” says the second annotation, now inside this elegantly published book, which we would still be careful not to call a novel, as it is difficult to call the great novel “Keep Forever” by Lev Kopelev or the stunning “Steep Route” by Evgenia Ginzburg.

"Roses and Chrysanthemums" is a different genre. These are highly artistic “memories of experiences” that can be used to make films and stage plays. This is the most accurate and subtle testimony about that sticky web of life from which we still cannot extricate ourselves. Life seen through the eyes of a child, which is especially impressive. That life in which the future members of the sixties completely signed up as pioneers and Komsomol members, and the old generation still remembered the Empress, the Vilna governor and the Parisian cafes of the beginning of the century.

What did not prevent this generation from at least fitting into society: participating in communal quarrels and fights, drinking, stealing, swearing, committing adultery, dreaming, being disappointed in Hitler and Stalin, performing noble deeds, begging, being mean, that is, living that full life animal-human life, which, as it turns out, is quite compatible with totalitarianism.

And former schoolchildren, who had seen enough of the Soviet mess since childhood, were allowed to participate in the human rights movement, demand correct Marxism or the correct tsar, read samizdat, fight for travel to their “historic homeland,” sit in prison for “slander of the social system” or, having gone through the art of conformism, to establish themselves in the honorable role of “foremen of perestroika.”

The unique details of a former existence, like the taste of that watermelon that the well-fed neighbors never treated the hungry girl to, are firmly fixed in the reader’s consciousness.

Here, finally, not in a caricature, but quite realistically, the person of a typical “sovpis” is depicted, perhaps not to blame for the fact that he shivered all his life under the communists, like a mouse under a broom, and, saving his family, ruined his immortal creative soul by writing party novels are “bricks” and involuntarily betraying loved ones.

Here, at last, those same “philistines” and “philistines” who thought only of themselves, but thereby gave everyone, the whole huge country, the opportunity to survive have been finally rehabilitated. Which were previously honored on all corners by lovers of Soviet romance and the song “The Brigantine Raises Sails.”

Here are the words and thoughts of children from those years, giving a tangible idea of ​​how things really were.

And yet, sad as it may be, in this dense book there are empty dialogues, unnecessary scenes, and entire pages that one is tempted to flip through, that is, to shorten, although, of course, not in such volume as this was made during a magazine publication in "Friendship of Peoples".

But “Roses and Chrysanthemums”, it seems, does not pretend to be a masterpiece, but takes its modest but very worthy place between the primitive chaos of Alexei German’s brilliant film “Khrustalev, the car!” and a movie cranberry called "East-West", where there is also a drunken neighbor, a slutty informer, and French speech is also heard. But maybe this “middle ground” will suit the jury? But there’s no point in guessing: everything will be as it will be. The real contenders for the Big Booker are still Mikhail Shishkin, Alexey Slapovsky, and maybe Marina Paley. Although, as you yourself understand, the fifth of December is quite capable of surprises.

...Stalin's constitution, Smirnoff - aka Booker... Modernism, postmodernism, conceptualism, realism, naturalism, mysticism Everything is mixed up again in the house where the devil jokes and Gaster rules.