Professional

January 14 - 100 years since the birth of Anatoly Rybakov

He was born on January 14, 1911 in Chernigov, managed to get into exile in relatively vegetarian times (1933), went through the entire war, which he finished as the head of the auto service of the guards corps, since 1947 he was mainly engaged in literature and ...

He was born on January 14, 1911 in Chernigov, managed to get into exile in relatively vegetarian times (1933), went through the entire war, which he finished as the head of the auto service of the guards corps, since 1947 he was mainly engaged in literature and became famous for three trilogies.

One described teenagers of the twenties and firmly moved into the category of children's reading: this is our teenage detective story based on colorful early Soviet material - Dirk, Bronze Bird, Shot. The second belonged to the sixties literature about new people, ruffy, as they say, but in the soul unconditionally ours: these are three stories about Krosh-Krasheninnikov - "The Adventures of Krosh", "Krosh's Holidays" and "The Unknown Soldier". The third brought Rybakov world fame and the status of one of the symbols of perestroika, and it is she who, unfortunately, is now increasingly being subjected to snobbish ridicule: these are three autobiographical novels about war, terror and exile - "Children of the Arbat", "Fear" and "Ashes and Ashes ".

It is impossible not to mention, of course, “Heavy Sand” - a novel whose indisputable merits were in the shadow of its seventies sensationalism: then everything related to the Jewish topic acquired an inevitable touch of scandal, although Rybakov himself resisted this as best he could. For him, as he repeated in an interview, this novel is not so much about the Holocaust, but about love. Of course, in the era of shamefully hidden state anti-Semitism - however, steadily exaggerated in hindsight, because under the Soviet regime it was by no means only Jews who felt bad - "Heavy Sand" could not be read from a neutral aesthetic position, and Rybakov's main talent, the ability to rise to myth from simple, intelligible, detailed prose. Rybakov did not proceed from speculation, but from the ground, he knew how to build a reliable, dynamic and exciting narrative with bright, somewhat one-dimensional - as the myth requires - convincing and solid characters. In a sense, he is an ideal children's writer, if the word "childish" is understood not as a pejorative, not a simplification and straightening of life, but just the ability and love to build whole, densely populated, vibrant worlds. Rybakov's worlds are cozy, their details are perfectly remembered - and it is difficult to imagine communal schools of the twenties, youth cafes of the sixties and Ukrainian towns of the thirties otherwise than they are written by him.

The same ability to create memorable worlds made his Arbat trilogy one of the symbols of quickly ended, but still great times: Rybakov’s Moscow during the Great Terror so etched itself into the memory of readers - both domestic and foreign - that even the aphorism “No man - no problems” began to be attributed to the real Stalin. Whereas it was invented by Rybakov, who created perhaps the most convincing reconstruction of the Stalinist internal monologue (I don’t even know with whom to compare it - with Dombrovsky in The Faculty?).

All the more offensive is some “backwardness”, the fading into the shadow of Rybakov’s trilogy about the children of the Arbat, which is increasingly being called the literature of a purely perestroika, superficial, fiction - thereby repeating the insulting label that Tvardovsky similarly hung on Rybakov, which is told in the “Roman-Memories ". Tvardovsky was a man with a remarkably precise taste, but extremely biased - Zabolotsky, let's say, remained beyond his comprehension; he also had a long-standing prejudice against the urban ones, plus the traditional conviction of the Russian reader (especially from the rural ones, who love everything solid) that good prose should be written hard and just as hard to read. Rybakov wrote in a completely different way, in the glorious adventure tradition: the spirit of the area is conveyed not through a boring watery landscape, but through the rhythm of the hero's walk along a Moscow street or the Volga coast. The notorious internal monologue is free from reflections: after all, the hero does not explain to himself whom he has in mind, he uses nicknames, clichés, remembers not episodes, but words. In general, to paraphrase the words of Victoria Tokareva about Dovlatov, this prose is light, like steam over soup, but you can see how much is cooked in this soup.

In general, it seems to me, the reason for the cooling of some - quite a significant - part of the readers to Rybakov is not that his prose is superficial, or fictional, or journalistic (otherwise we all read Proust excitedly, aesthetes), but that Rybakov talked about the Good Soviet Man, who, from the point of view of today's majority, did not exist and could not exist. I notice that a huge number of my quite sane friends go berserk, it’s worth talking about the Soviet regime in front of them, and they remind her not only of the repressions that they didn’t catch, but also “difficult childhood, wooden toys”: queues, poor-quality rags and a muffin, the impossibility of really relax in the Maldives, not to mention the catastrophic lingerie.

With such rabid personal hatred, one can only speak of a great unconceived plan that beckoned something superhuman and unprecedented, but turned into what we have and will now have for a long time to come. Soviet power is hated by the majority of post-Soviet residents, who did not even sniff it (ambre was difficult, but in general it was something else) - not for repression, of course: in their post-Soviet life they willingly and even joyfully endure any humiliation. Particularly amusing is the anti-Soviet rhetoric of Nashi and other gold miners. Soviet power - and the good people who lived under it and did something - are hated solely on the principle of "green grapes"; they hate with the hatred that small people feel for big ones, and not at all in the way that the good criticize the evil.

So Rybakov was the writer of these good Soviet people, a contemporary and friend of Krosh, Sasha Pankratov, Gleb Dubinin, Misha Polyakov, Vari Ivanova. Now it is believed that there are no good Soviet people, but if the inhabitants of Russia were morally consistent with their power, our country would be an unalloyed hell. Rybakov studied those basics that allow a person to survive in any conditions - however, he did not see the most terrible ones, he was lucky, but I think that he would not have gone ugly there either. An even sense of reliability emanated from him, he could be vain, and even rustic, but categorically incapable of meanness. And the two feelings that kept him from the temptations of any era, whether they were social, national or ideological temptations, are not exactly those that Pushkin called (“love for his native ashes, love for his father’s coffins”), but close. In fact, it is only on these two pillars that any person can stand, autonomous in the storms of time and independent of the situation. The first is the feeling of family, clan, and this feeling in Rybakov was determined not only by biological kinship: his characters know how to value friendship, they easily make it and it is difficult to lose it, and few people were so able to write about the joy of camaraderie as the author of Children of the Arbat. For this Arbatism - a feeling of friendly solidarity, generational solidarity - this book was so loved even by those contemporaries who had never seen any Arbat, only heard about it near Okudzhava. And the second quality, which is especially important for Rybakov's heroes, which separates them so sharply from the heroes of today's prosaic tediousness: they are all professionals. People with a calling.

I will say now, probably not a very pleasant thing, but under the Soviet regime, in general, two categories of people survived - Professionals and Scum. The rest perished for various reasons: some gloriously, others shamefully; but heroic death can hardly be the attitude of the majority. It was possible to survive either at the cost of frantic denunciation and shameless conformism, or at the cost of the indispensability of those very high professional skills that allowed both specialists with the wrong origin, and intellectuals who told anecdote, and hard-working skeptics like Batalov's Gosha to survive.

Strictly speaking, these same two categories survive under any Russian government, since the Soviet period is only the most total, graphic, and frank; in a country of negative selection, where the authorities, by definition, can do nothing but choke, yell and engage in demagogy, professionals are the only guarantees of general survival. And therefore, if you want to survive here, you must be able to work. Above Rybakov's desk hung the best literary motto I know: "In order to write, one must write." And he wrote - and finished his trilogy with an eighty-three-year-old strong old man; and I must say that its last pages are better, more economical, stronger than the first, although there is much less optimism in them.

The war described in Dust and Ashes was by no means the most glorious page in national history for Rybakov. Here he was in solidarity with Astafiev, because he also fought and also for real. War for them is the pinnacle of a national tragedy, for it destroys the gold fund of the nation. For Rybakov, the most valuable thing is not the readiness to die - let the staff nightingales who are not on the front line revel in it - for him the most valuable thing is the ability to do a job. It is worth reading, with what love - and what knowledge of the profession! - Boris Ivanovsky, a shoemaker, tells about himself. For him, the main identification is this: a shoemaker, a craftsman. And not "Jew" or "citizen of the USSR." Profession is the ground on which Rybakov's heroes stand, whether they are "Drivers", or soldiers, or historians. A man is what he did, not what he thought or regretted. Less lyrics. It is necessary to work, and you will be a person who stands firmly on his feet. This is the main thing. And we, today, cannot forgive them then, because we really don’t know how to do anything.

He also hated Stalin with the hatred of a professional for a person who really doesn’t know how to do anything except how to shit left and right, to everyone indiscriminately. He was well aware that Stalin would still be called both a strong leader and a “successful manager” (although this particular abomination hardly occurred to him: he was a realist, not a satirist); and was in a hurry to show Stalin in the most accurate way - as a man who could not do anything. Unless to scare - yes to formulate in such a way that the most notorious, most aggressive cattle could take these formulas into service. Rybakovsky Stalin is by no means an idiot, but not the great villain that Solzhenitsyn saw him as; this is a man who has never done business in his life, is not trained in anything, is deprived of a professional conscience - and, in addition, a bad family man, a bad friend: Rybakov does not forgive this. The theme of the Stalinist family, the story of Nadezhda Alliluyeva - seemingly not conditioned by the plot in Children of the Arbat - actually turns out to be the core of the story: Rybakov looked like his Boris Ivanovsky. He liked it when the characters loved each other a lot. He could not stand people who are not responsible for anyone and do not produce anything.

Russia will definitely get out of its current state, and people like Rybakov will pull it out. They can annoy someone, and cause envy in someone; but there really is no other recipe than that discovered by them.

Otherwise - only "Heavy Sand", "Fear", "Dust and Ashes".