Not funny

Publishing house "Falanster" has published a new book of Vsevolod Emelin, entitled "Swamp Songs". Here I must say that more than once I had to read and hear reproaches of literary criticism, as if ignoring this popular author of satirical poetry and - wider - satire and humorism in general. As a rule, reproaching explain this conspiracy of silence by the pureness of a high culture in relation to “dirty” matters and impudent encroachments on aesthetic taboo. The comic of the situation lies in the fact that the division of culture into a high and low long time exists only in the heads of satirists and their intercessors-it is humorous texts that often stubbornly want to seem something else, register with the "high culture" department, and are offended that they are not allowed to Olympus.

It is characteristic that the publisher’s completely apologetic preface to the same “swamp songs” ends with the words: “... the poet, not without some detachment, looks along with his heroes from eternity to all this ridiculous or terrible vanity. This is exactly what Emelin knows how, like no one, to see eternity and show, to force to see the eternal one who takes his poems to read. Actually, that is why you will now read poetry, not rhymed feuilletons. ” Julia Gugolev, Fedor Swarovsky, Andrei Rodionov and many other modern poets have very funny poems, but try to imagine such a warning to their book. The polemic with unknown spiteful people who lead Emelin's work to the poetic feuilleton (although what is the dworen poem feuilleton?) Looks like an invitation: we might not have glued labels, but you, Zin, are rudeness on rudeness.

However, the satire herself is praised by her birth injury for a very important reason: “low genres” requires an unshakable literary canon as the same stove from which the poetry poet is dancing in his work, due to its very nature, his main task is to protect the simplest everyday norm. All the purely aesthetic properties of the satire are also subordinate to this extraovitarian goal: it is extremely democratic, and therefore, it is extremely conservative. It is not for nothing that the poetic satire - to take at least Emeline, at least the “citizen of the poet” by Dmitry Bykov - not only uses the traditional projection, but borrows unmistakably recognizable sizes directly from the school curriculum and is full of textbook quotes, not always justified by the plot. The reference to the sacred canon of Russian literature legitimizes the satire, giving it not only cultural weight, but also moral authority. Actually, it is for this reason that our reviews and reviews could serve as satirical poetry - and not only because it lives well without them. From the point of view of the artistic device, there is nothing to interpret there: if the satirical technique is not read at first glance the most inexperienced reader, it means that it simply does not work. For example, Emelin’s long -standing text “Wahhabita Death” is spinning in my head: “Like the Holy Sharia / Owner, / went to jihad / young Wahhabit” and so on. This poem is a great example showing a mechanism that turns the traditional into a funny one. In that text, everything worked: the size taken from the Has-Bolate Darecase, and the reference to the people's beloved by the film “The White Sun of the Desert”, and the more appropriate quote “And the Taliban passes- / Salute Abdullah!”. It is terribly funny - but the preparation just kills the comic effect. As for the propaganda function of criticism - it is also excluded here: Emeline's texts diverged between readers with a viral way, and there would be bad humorous poems to the anger of the day that would need to promote literary publications from the pages.

But today I see a reason to talk about Emelin's work and with a joyful anticipation I open “Swamp Songs”. The fact is that the time has come when the main function of the satire suddenly became very important and in demand: this thought can be best explained from the foundation of the composer Nikolai Karenikov, who, in turn, quoting Shostakovich, who are beloved by our editors. “After talking about music, Dmitry Dmitrievich suddenly asked me:“ But, Nikolai Dmitrievich, have you seen, so to speak, this film, this film, which everyone, so to speak, is very fond of? ” - What film, Dmitry Dmitrievich? - So to speak, “your contemporary” here, “your contemporary”? - I saw, Dmitry Dmitrievich. - It is very interesting what you say, what you say, very interesting! .. - Well, I don’t know, Dmitry Dmitrievich! You probably will be bored to watch him ... - Why, so to speak, why? - The fact is that the main character in this film is the Caetan gas, and the moral truths affirmed in it do not go beyond those that we were talking about in childhood for all of us: do not steal, do not lie, respect the elders ... - this is wonderful! This is amazing! Just now, so to speak, it has come, the time has come when it is necessary, so to speak, we must repeat. There must be a wonderful, so to speak, wonderful film. I will definitely go, be sure, so to speak, I'll go see! "

And then there is a feeling that now, so to speak, it has come again for Russian society the time when it is necessary to repeat the truisms and there is the hope that they will be heard. In the winter of 2011-2012, the educated class made an effort, which no one expected from him, and the least-he himself: consolidated in the face of a common enemy or common trouble and put aside ideological, aesthetic and in many ways even ethical disagreements to go together to Bolotnaya Square, and then come again, and again, and many more times. And, probably, the most powerful impression of this experience was the feeling that all those who were in this square were united by the idea of ​​the same simplest everyday norm, a mockery of which well, there is no more effort to endure. And then, it would seem, the star hour is coming for a satirist: who else to raise our fighting spirit, if not the most democratic and conservative of genres.

I did not specifically follow the work of Emelin, not seeing the applications in it with her professional efforts, and I was happy to meet him as a simple reader - in a viral way, from case to case. But “Swamp Songs” is a collection with a common position in the title and with the poem of Alexander Blok “Love this Eternity of the Swamps: / Never dry up by their power” (The application, whatever one may say!). And what kind of disappointment it was: it turned out to be not at all funny. Perhaps the reason for this is just the oppression of excessive responsibility of the moment, but something broke in the reliable grandfather’s satirical mechanism.

In each of the “Swamp Songs”, the author chooses the only metaphor (say, identifying the process of lowering the ballot with sexual intercourse) and travels on it for thirteen stanzas, and if which could be ridiculous, chewing strangled this chance. Quotes from Yesenin, Mandelstam, Blok, Mayakovsky reach a threatening concentration - but here they no longer give the author’s thoughts of any additional volume, and sometimes they simply cross the boundary of good taste, as in the description of the voter’s feelings before the urn: “I stand, a piece of paper fodder, / experiencing shame and sticky horror. / Reader, adviser, doctor! / Sexopathologist besides ”-in poetry there is no tabular topics and there is no object that is not subject to the feeling of ridiculous, but here I do not see any artistic task-only human deafness. This is just an appeal to a pure tradition, which automatically evokes a sense of trust in the main author’s message in a Russian -speaking reader. The trouble is what this message is.

The philistine common sense is not always likely at all, and often even directly contradicts our own beliefs.

The point is not that I do not agree with Emelin - although I understand that I can’t avoid this reproach, because his favorite target is the so -called “liberal public”, a class of people, about which, in turn, I do not judge that I belong to them.

The fact is that the traditional, most working intonation of the satirist is a simple -minded moralizing voice of worldly wisdom. It is terribly contagious: deep down, we are all languishing by simplicity, and if the author is talented and sincere, we, laughing, cannot but solidify with him at this moment, despite the fact that this philistine common sense is not always so health, and often even directly contradicts our own beliefs. You can recall at least as A.K. Tolstoy in the satirical poem “Stream-Bogatyr” ridicules the cut suffrains that prepare the corpse for scientific purposes: “Well, we also happened on the bald grief, / only witches and barefoot, / but, by extreme, they have braids!” (It would seem that what is so wild in female equality and in the study of medicine?). Or to take, for example, Arkady Averchenko, incredibly wittily mocked over abstract art from the perspective of the philistine “common sense”: I think that now in the most reactionary minds abstractionism has long won the right to exist, but humor Averchenka was not faded from this. In both cases we are on the side of the author: the connection of times broke up around and there is nothing to rely on the embarrassed mind - but the author has at least any, but a positive program. Tolstoy, ridicuating Emanasip, relies on the ideal of a hawthorn in a kokoshnik. Averchenko, for example, criticizes abstract art from the standpoint of the Wanderers. But Vsevolod Emelin, ridicurating, on the one hand, the government, on the other hand, the snapping the Moscow intelligentsia, and from the third - his own left comrades, does not show us a soothing positive hero. Not-albeit on the popular, albeit in a kokoshnik-in each of us the responding human truth, such as an ingenuous conclusion of the Bogatyr stream: “I do not know what some progress means, / but to the sound Russian eve, sovereign, far away!” Emelin has a simple person, “breathing fumes, like fate and soil” and offended by the whole world, no more pretty neighbors on the page. He, of course, is a sacrifice - but he is a resoner, since the author is identified with him, unexpectedly and awkwardly: “To the right - glamorous fagots, / left - Putin's profras. / It is not for the choice for us / for masters of culture. "

Humor and satire are usually ridiculous because they expose the savagery of innovations in the eyes of a conservative norm. But in the picture of the world that develops in “Swamp Songs”, there is no norm - even as an unattainable, but desired ideal. So, there is no that clearance in which the liberating laughter appears. In general, I will allow myself a quote and I: “I am mired in a deep swamp, and there is nothing to become on” (Psalter, 68: 3).

I, most importantly, do not argue - the opposition is comic, the power is comical, the people are comical, and everyone is good. But when I read new poems by Emelin-as a reader, it’s not funny for me, but as a literary observer-it is difficult not to think that humorous texts do not need to pretend to be something else and register with the department of “high art”, when they are sincerely happy with the place of the main registration.