Track #9

...Between the lake of mirrors

The demon sparkled in fear...

Vladimir Mayakovsky

I never took this author seriously. He considered the enthusiasm around him to be completely exaggerated and attributed them to symptoms of sociocultural paranoia. Now, after the publication of “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf,” literary critics seem to have come to their senses: they showered Victor Pelevin with a tub of reproaches. But for some reason I’m not happy about this.

I think 60 percent of the negative reviews are due to the fact that the release of the novel was prepared in unprecedented secrecy: no press circulation, no preliminary interviews, no fragments for exclusive publication. That is, the Smishniks were prevented from properly working out the occasion . Most likely, such secrecy was insisted not by the marketers of the Eksmo concern, but by Pelevin himself, offended by critics for the old ways.

Well, now the critics are offended by Pelevin for being fresh. In addition, if you compose a review hastily (the journalists who got hold of the text only on the day sales began on November 9 had no alternative), we somehow automatically fall into the abusive mode: it’s more ergonomic. Liza Novikova almost directly called the prose writer an onanist . “There is no lightness, no naturalness. The irony seems forced, the jokes are forced, the feuilletonous reflections on modernity in general and the current state of our fatherland in particular are banal,” complained Nikolai Alexandrov. “The magnificent thinking apparatus of an intelligent, caustic and well-read author is running idle,” Maya Kucherskaya was upset . “A stream of formal quality falls on the reader, which makes up for the lack of new content. The problem, however, is that with constant reproduction this quality loses its value,” recited Kirill Reshetnikov.

Just a second; Let's think about Kirill's aphorism. Firstly, it was precisely the formal quality (compositional coherence, lexical intelligibility) that Pelevin’s previous opuses lacked; Particularly indicative in this sense is the dissolving under the pupils of “DPP (NN)”, and “Chapaev and Emptiness” from the point of view of high craft - an opus that is frankly helpless, even extra-literary (as the jury of the Russian Booker 1997 justifiably referred to , which did not include the novel in the shortlist). Secondly, the thesis that quality depreciates when reproduced may puzzle the brand ideologist of any reputable company that supplies goods or services to the consumer market. Are you saying that the latest Daewoo model is not inferior in quality to the old one? To the trash heap!

Actually, this is the leitmotif of the complaints about the “Book of the Werewolf”: a work of art is not a refrigerator, the trading rules are not written for it. The claims seem to be unconscious; after all, in an abstract conversation, each of the quoted critics would certainly support the development of civilized book commerce. Nevertheless, the former Pelevin, who allowed himself to skimp abroad ("Helmet of Horror") and marinate fans for years in anticipation of a new book, they clearly like them more than the current Pelevin, whom Eksmo obliged to publish a novel a year.

Even faithful admirer Dmitry Bykov is disappointed : “If a person understands everything so well about current reality, and about business, and about money, it is a sin for him to put his ability to produce feuilleton novels on stream... It turns out somehow inconsistent. What you mock, that’s what you serve.” A diamond coincidence with the rude invective of the longtime persecutor Mikhail Zolotonosov: “Where you eat, there you shit... Managers use Pelevin like a fountain pen.”

Meanwhile, from an impartial perspective, the symbiosis with Eksmo only favors the cult author; he entered the totalitarian machinery of the largest Russian publishing house, sliding like a red male fist into a rubber glove. Undoubtedly, “The Holy Book” is Pelevin’s most literary work of high quality. Complex, but proportionate (I would like to say openwork) architectonics. Minimum of stylistic mistakes. Comfort for the recipient: you travel 380 pages as if on the softest springs. "Generation "P", for example, is much bumpier. And more dreary.

Of course, such an assessment smacks of taste. I’m not going to argue point by point with those who didn’t like the novel. Yes, interpretations of “Lolita”, “The Scarlet Flower” and “Black Square”, passages about the essence of female beauty, Boris the Big Nest and Vladimir the Red Crust, Wittgenstein and Freud are more banal than the banal. Yes, strained bilingual puns ( “Live not by lies. LG” , Occam’s Razor condoms, emigrant, “caught vProzak” , dubious exploitation of the similarity between shit and “Shiite”) significantly spoil the impression; but is “The Respectable Lord for Respectable Gentlemen” from “Generation “P”, caressed by the same criticism, more witty? Pelevin’s humor is a little flat from the cradle.

However, in "Werewolf" there is something that was not in Pelevin's previous books: a compact disc . I'm hardly kidding; a CD with eleven vocal and instrumental numbers, only one of which is performed in Russian. Thus, the words of the songs are incomprehensible to the average domestic listener; Only the melodies are intelligible, among which the ninth is the most beautiful. Equipped with the following comment on the envelope: “The infinite beauty of a mirror. What can compare with it except another mirror? So they have been looking at each other since the very beginning of time.”

Melody. Intonation , permeating and holding together the lengthy body of the text. Of course, in the “Book” there is not a single original philosophical concept, not a single independent plot device; it is not proper for a mirror to be original; its task is to reflect what is present as fully as possible and to stitch and frame it with its own frame. Ranking perspective. I’ll add one thing to the long list of borrowings noted by reviewers: Pelevin’s fox-narrator, who feeds on the sexual exhaust of men, is very similar to the heroine of Michel Faber’s novel “Be in My Skin.” In Faber's work, the alien Isserly, driving along the lost Scottish highways, hunts corpulent male hichhikers, whose meat is considered a delicacy on her home planet. Surgically, the customers of the product gave Isserly an anthropomorphic appearance, but initially she walked on four legs and was proud of her thick hair and bushy tail. Little by little, the predator is imbued with the rhythmic charm of a world alien to her - and through the cultural barrier, through unbearable physical pain, she absorbs it into herself. Becomes his echo. Isserly is an ideal amalgam, capable of mimicry and therefore compassion. So is the were-fox from “Werewolf”; the same - but only now, after reaching market maturity - is Pelevin himself. We will consider this his debut novel.

It’s easy to believe that the writer, for the first time in his life, bound by a strict contract, throughout his work - perhaps also for the first time in his life - the oppressive inspiration did not let go (see the email interview given the other day to Izvestia: “I feel such explosive power in this book that I’m scared. And I want, just in case, to move away before I get scared.” I want to too. On the night of the 9th to the 10th, while listening to the track #9 I almost died from the realization of Pelevin’s congeniality). The scene of begging for oil in front of the skull of the Motley Cow, no matter what they say, is adjacent to the most powerful insights of modern Russian literature; tuning-fork melodic topicality, the deep and cutting modernity of most of the remarks (especially the remarks of the werewolf Sasha, who, for example, believes that in our country the word “liberal” “means an unscrupulous ferret who hopes that they will give him some money if he rolls his eyes and repeats that twenty parasites bursting with fat should continue to hold all of Russia by the balls due to the fact that at the beginning of the so-called privatization, they sold flowers in the right place" ) is beyond doubt. Endless sequences of heterogeneous borrowings, cheap jokes and second-rate popularization blizzard in the “Holy Book” are just a way to measure the polish of the mirror; the final Rainbow Flow is nothing more than a flow of universal clichés that cannot be fought. One can only mock them. Or, what is the same thing, sing along with them. A particularly mocking time has come. Time to sing along.

How serious am I? As serious as Pelevin is. In a number of places, unfortunately, it was not possible to avoid excessive pathos. What can you do: the best review of “The Sacred Book of the Werewolf” was already published on Monday by Andrei Nemzer. These are - check, don’t be lazy - two newspaper columns, filled to the brim with absolutely meaningless, grumpy rhetoric. In fact, Nemzer's boo-boo-boo is the only adequate reaction to Pelevin's he-he-he.

“I was so scared that I screamed. He jumped away from me, turned to the mirror, saw, twitched and whined. Only then did I come to my senses. By that moment I already understood that something terrible had happened to him, some kind of catastrophe, and I was to blame. The catastrophe was caused by my kiss, that electric chain of love that I closed by pressing my lips into his mouth.”