Alexander Ageev. Hunger 33

Hunger 33
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: May 24, 2001

It’s even somehow inconvenient to tell: I’ve been struggling with Leonid Girshovich’s new book “The Closed Worlds of Dr. Price” for two weeks now - I can’t finish reading it! I’ve already tried everything - both slowly and thoughtfully, with a pencil, and fluently and assertively (it happens that you only get into some books at a decent speed), and took it with you on the subway - so that it doesn’t even smell like an alternative. Does not help! It doesn’t hum - there is no internal thrust, there is no turbine in the text that creates this thrust.

And I would like to give up this seemingly hopeless business, not to suffer in vain, but I know for sure: the writer Girshovich is real, and when, I remember, I read his “Exchanged Heads,” wow, what a turbine hummed there, drawing me into the text and keeping me in intellectual vibration until the end ! Then there was just “Price” - it was easier, a kind of caustic version of “alternative history”, even though Girshovich wrote it in the idyllic 80s, long before the current fashion. The novel was long and tortuous, but I finished reading it! And “Closed Worlds” - well, no way.

There’s such a strange thing: I understand what each individual paragraph is about, what the value of each individual period is, and it’s even possible, with a certain amount of attention, to put together a kind of “whole” (well, at least draw a plot), but it’s better, really, do not collect. It turns out to be a large plate with spicy seasonings, but without the main dish. In Russian, say - a pie with this. A lively, chatty tongue drags somewhere the author, choked in his element, and some kind of vulgar Odessa debasement of the Nabokov type painfully offends the ear.

Happenes. And something more and more often. It’s impossible, for example, to read the “new” Marina Paley without irritation - neither last year’s “script imitations” under the general title “Long Distance” , nor the recent “Ural” “tragicomedy” “The Immersion” . That is, the writer, of course, is not forbidden to become “new” and “different” at any moment, and this “workaround” even gives him the opportunity to temporarily avoid the use of a rough rating scale of “better - worse,” but for a very short time, until the reader becomes bored with this “other” and, if his head is not heavily loaded with some “concepts” (that is, there is still trust in elementary intuition), returns to the primitive scale. Therefore, if we are to become “new,” then only by marking the turn with an unambiguously strong text that can break the inertia of perception.

But these are public times, and I strongly suspect that there are no such writers’ “laboratories” hidden from view (and the evil eye): the doors of the previously mysterious creative “kitchen” are wide open, and we are vying with each other to be fed the “first pancakes.”

It’s a pity for the heirs - they will be left with completely empty writing desks: no drafts, no “other editions,” and, especially, completed opuses, however, left in the manuscript of their own free will.

It may well be that writers’ careful attention to all the details of their “creative path” is a painful reaction to a decline in social status. Or maybe everything is simpler - simple and rude editors without “concepts”, but with a “sense” (not to mention critics), who were able to say even to a writer with a “name” have disappeared somewhere: “This is bullshit, my friend.” , you have composed. Set aside, let it ripen." Nowadays it is customary to say thoughtfully: “Yes, this is some new stage in your work, a new period...” Against the backdrop of a long-term crisis of criteria, few people want to seem like a straightforward fool - it’s better to say the middle half: yes, they say, the cut is new The king's dresses are excellent, but the material could be cooler.

But for me personally, as a reader, any such uncooked “pancake” is a kind of aesthetic trauma. You begin to doubt your own readability and painfully search for where did I (perhaps inadvertently) miss those key phrases that would immediately endow the crumbling text with unity and meaning?

Well, in a word, immediately afterwards you urgently need to read something of unconditional quality, otherwise you’ll suffer from heartburn.

This week I was lucky: I opened the 5th issue of Znamya, and first there was a very good selection by Mikhail Eisenberg (the poems are nostalgic, but some are very strong), followed immediately by a new name that means nothing to me: Marina Moskvina. "Diamond Sutra Trash Can." Novel. Well, in this case there is no need to be afraid of the word “novel” - there are thirty-odd magazine pages in the entire novel. And for the first three pages you are perplexed: some kind of Buddhist pathos with howls, a functionally meaningless transformation of the narrator into a dachshund (well, not played out anywhere later!), in a word, “low-artistic” shamanism that can quickly turn a fragile reader away from the text.

But from point 5 (the entire novel is divided into episodes by numbers without spaces), something like a family saga begins: “ My great-great-grandfather Semyon Kirillovich Posidelkin, although he was not a model of prudence, virtue, prudence and beauty, tried all his life, nowhere without turning back, move along the Road of gradual enlightenment, improving day and night in spiritual practice ."

There and further in the text, all kinds of Buddhistism are present, but somehow surprisingly unobtrusively, and you quickly cease to be burdened by it (that is, Moskvina’s novel describes an option that is much more optional than Pelevin’s in “Chapaev...”, not to mention the stubborn Ivanchenko).

Well, a family saga is built from small fairy-tale-fantastic and at the same time concrete everyday short stories, legends and traditions are drawn mainly from the stylized 20s - 30s, and at some stage of reading you suddenly begin to hear Platonov’s distinct voice. And - a rare case - "Platonic" does not arise from language (as, for example, in Oleg Pavlov - what disgusting thing is that Pavlov of yours!), but somehow "above" language, at the level of pathos (here I use the word "pathos" in in the strict terminological sense: the ideological and emotional tone of the work).

Imagine, however, a kind, not at all tragic, Platonov who does not smell of earth and death, and add to this a drop of the “Zoshchenkoism” inevitable when stylizing the pre-war era - this will be the style of Marina Moskvina.

In short, you swallow more than thirty magazine pages in one breath, without even stumbling on the last pages, where the dysfunctional dachshund appears again. That is, you can, of course, come up with a certain role for this dachshund, but why, if it does little to prevent the text from being absorbed and enjoyable?

However, I can very well imagine critics who will not be in the least excited by Moskvina’s amazing transformation of the “Platonic”, but their thoughts will rest on this very unfortunate dachshund and frivolous Buddhism and begin to build something quasi-intellectual around their role in the novel. Relax, send such interpreters to hell.

The editorial sidebar says that the Yekaterinburg publishing house "U-factory" is publishing a one-volume book by Moskvina - you will have to not miss it.

Well, by the way, since we are talking about the “Znamensky” 5th issue: there again Vladimir Shpakov crossed the pathof Inna Bulkina , that is, he wrote a text about the magazine “Khreshchatyk” . It must be said that Shpakov is much more merciful towards an international magazine with Kyiv roots than the jealous Kiev resident Bulkina...