This is criticism

We continue to publish conversations with literary critics. Today the “guest” of the column is Mikhail Zolotonosov .

Russian Journal: Is there now a difference between Moscow and St. Petersburg literature? If so, what is it? If not, when did this division lose its relevance?

Mikhail Zolotonosov: Once upon a time, in the 1930-1940s, the difference was caused by the relict remains of that division into the capital (St. Petersburg) and the province (Moscow), which was established by the pre-revolutionary order. Now there is also a difference, it is caused by the division into metropolitan (Moscow) and provincial (St. Petersburg) literature. There is a stronger influx to Moscow and to Moscow magazines and publishing houses. And St. Petersburg, especially in recent years, if it lasts, it sucks.

Vyacheslav Kuritsyn moved here - he earns his living from PR, for example, he recently zombified the “tops” by electing Matvienko as our governor. She herself, Valentina Tyutina, is from Shepetovka, Kuritsyn is from Sverdlovsk...

Recently a request came to St. Petersburg from the Nobel Committee : they asked to send a candidate. Our people sent the name " Granin ". Poor, but touching. The point is not even that Granin has not been a writer for a long time, he has not written anything “Nobel” in his entire life. But “our town” is small, we are proud of everything we do.

RJ: You are known as a consistent critic of the bonus process. How do you feel about the St. Petersburg awards (named after Andrei Bely , “ National Bestseller ”)? Do they differ in any way from Moscow - in one direction or another?

M.Z.: They are no different, the same squalor, aplomb and desperate lies intended for sponsors: there is literature and that’s why “give me a million!”

RJ: In a review of one of your books, Gleb Morev wrote : “Zolotonosov... has long been captivated by two eternal themes - Jewry and... sex.” Do you agree with this characterization?

M.Z.: Morev was mistaken: I study not “Jewishness”, but the SRA - the subculture of Russian anti-Semitism, I have a book “The Master and Margarita” as a guide to the SRA, a number of articles on this topic. Anti-Semitism is not “Jewishness”, it’s a little different, it’s a fact of Russian culture, not Jewish, Jews have nothing to do with it, it’s the fruit of “Russian blasphemy” (I had an article with that title , published in “UFO”), but in Morev cannot understand such subtleties.

In the words about captivity one can hear condemnation. Morev, as an “organizer of literary life,” knows what to write about. But due to my youth and foolishness, I don’t know and I’m writing, of course, about the wrong thing , because I forgot to ask Morev what I should write about. If we talk about captivity , then it was Morev <...> who managed to live in Israel and therefore, in communication with Timenchik and in the Middle Eastern context, he was forced to “mow” as a Jew, that is, he was “in captivity.” Everyone sublimates their own problems. Besides, it’s simply ridiculous to comment on Morev’s definitions - who is he ? You never know who wrote anything about me.

RJ: How does psychoanalysis work in the analysis of modern literature? And does a critic need to master the techniques of psychoanalysis in relation to the text?

M.Z.: It works well. Although I do not rule out that modern man is already simpler than “Freudian”. But each researcher decides for himself, it all depends on the work being analyzed and the ability / desire to discover something using this method.

Moreover, the matter does not come down to quotes from Freud . There are principles of interpretation. In addition, there is Karen Horney , on the one hand (the “female version” of psychoanalysis), there is Sandor Ferenczi , on the other. There are modern psychoanalysts, say, Joyce McDougall . In my opinion, their works help to identify the “problem matrix” of modern man and understand the entire “range of problems.” But there are other methods that must also be applied ad hoc, based on the characteristics of the text. All this is elementary.

RJ: You have repeatedly reproached modern literature for the fact that PR technologies play an increasingly important role in it. Can you name any critics, awards or magazines that are more driven by aesthetic considerations than others?

M.Z.: No. Less and less.

RJ: You are much more skeptical about current literature than most of your colleagues. You yourself defined one of your articles as a requiem for modern Russian prose. What are the causes of this crisis?

M.Z.: There are no talented writers. Even those who started out interesting, for example, Vladimir Makanin , Vladimir Sorokin , have written out. Tatyana Tolstaya quickly wrote herself off, it’s hard to imagine greater squalor than “ Kys ”. I don't blame them, I feel sorry for them. However, the general situation is this: talent is no longer important at all - writers are now all who bang on the keyboard. Advertising works, the book has become a market product. This is the main cause of the crisis - the market, which has suppressed creativity. Instead of creativity - a combination of cliches. They call Daria Dontsova and Tatyana Ustinova writers, and they convince the “boots” that they are now writers. Previously they suggested that Yuri Bondarev or Alexander Chakovsky, and now Dontsova and Ustinova. Dmitry Bykov, an insignificant and mediocre crook, is reputed to be almost a genius and he himself produces just about anyone as a writer... Tolstaya does the same in the program where she portrays the countess-granddaughter, and her partner - the maid Dunyashka. They call you on the carpet and say to Dontsova, Ustinova, like a stamp on your forehead: you are a writer. They puff up with happiness: the Countess admitted it! Advertising calls a certain Lipskerov a cult figure. Olga Slavnikova also passed for a writer in Moscow, already on some jury... You were simply stunned there in Moscow.

RJ: Do you see any breakthrough points in our literature now, are there names with which you pin special hopes? What (and who), in your opinion, can bring literature out of crisis?

M.Z.: I have special hopes for Putin. In connection with the offensive of the gebukha on all fronts, from economics to ideology (Putin is the leader of this offensive), literature may experience a rise caused by a reaction to political pressure and immersion in an ocean of shit.

RJ: In one of your articles you write : “I would like to note in passing that what is happening now in St. Petersburg looks like a large-scale tragicomic novel in the spirit of Zola’s “Prey” or Platonov’s “The Pit.” But writers have forgotten how to be interested in life, and do not set responsible tasks for themselves.” . Do you connect literature’s recovery from crisis with turning to topical material? Aren't you afraid that this kind of thing will inevitably become newspaper journalism?

M.Z.: It’s a pity that you haven’t read “ The Pit ” by Andrei Platonov. The question is caused by a misunderstanding of the nature of the same “Pit,” which is full of specific polemics with Stalin, that is, with Stalin’s articles published in Pravda in 1929-1930, and in this sense is “newspaper-journalistic.” I had a long article about “The pit”, and there the quote roll is shown. Are you afraid of the appearance of a work written using the “Pit” method? "Newspaper" " Demons " by Dostoevsky.

The problem I see is that they simply write about nothing, because they know nothing about real life. At best, they set out their personal life difficulties, like Valery Popov in “ The Third Wind ” - a helpless opus that has gone beyond the boundaries of literature. Writers watch TV, and there are lies, dissected information, creating a fictitious image of the situation. But this is precisely what becomes the basis for our writers’ worldview. Then they weave words. Another thing is that knowledge of reality does not mean that the novel will turn out good: you still cannot do without talent, which will turn a chronicle of current events into a work of art (a fresh thought!). But knowing reality has never hurt anyone.

An interesting example of luck is a text from Vladimir Sorokin's book "Feast", called "Mirror", a strange list of foods eaten, followed by a poetic description of the urge and processes of bowel movement. Each meal is dated, the first date is April 20, 2000, the last is May 19, 2000. Then, upon first reading, the meaning of “mirroring” remained unread, and the calendar period seemed random, and in general it was unclear what was reflected in this mirror . And only now, when the consequences of what was happening exactly then are clear (the start of the process of strengthening personal power), it becomes clear that we were dealing with a commentary .

Let's say, two calls on April 20 correspond to two significant events that became known on this day: Stepashin became the chairman of the Accounts Chamber, and Skuratov ceased to be the prosecutor general. On May 7 , when Putin was inaugurated, it was commented as follows: “An exhausting and painful exit. Upsetting discreteness... Cruel zoomorphism: a complete heap in the form of a humpbacked bear.” On May 11 , when the Prosecutor General's Office, with the forceful support of the FSB and the Federal Tax Police Service, conducted searches in four offices of Media-Most, including Gusinsky's office, Sorokin noted: “Brutal volcanism. Moans, laughter... Combinations of short and long segments with two spiral formations in a bronze-colored “lake.” On May 13, Putin signed a decree “On the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation in the Federal District,” dividing Russia into seven districts, and Sorokin commented on it this way: “Sweet crime of exit.” On May 17, the president addressed the people on TV, in particular, he said: “The country must be governed”; Sorokin in response again describes the urge and the form at the exit. On May 18, the reform of power in Russia began, the Federation Council was liquidated, presidential representatives were approved in the districts (mostly people from the special services and the army), to which Sorokin replied: “The pre-divinity of the way out... Tomorrow I will become God.” And on May 19, it already became clear that the entire previous scheme of the state had been broken, “and by the fall of this year, if things continue like this, we will live in another country,” to which Sorokin no longer had enough words, and he commented on two pages , covered with Latin letters: "ROT+ANUS+ROT+ANUS...". In other words, the political calendar turned out to be commented on by the events of the gastrointestinal tract, but no matter what was happening in the country, the author didn’t care... It turned out to be highly artistic, witty, and newspaper-journalistic, although the latter property was encrypted inside the dates.

RJ: “All this is far from novels about Cinderellas or the noisily advertised manuals “How to win a man,” but very close to the reality into which up to 80 percent of modern women are forcibly immersed. And therefore, in general, how literature defeats “male prose”, drowning in a meaningless game of words,” you say about one of the anthologies of women’s prose . Is “closeness to reality” a criterion of literary quality for you?

M.Z.: Oh, I was scared! But at school, children are first taught to write an essay based on a picture, and only then an essay about Katerina. “We need to study, study and study...” Only it was not Lenin who said this in his speech “Tasks of Youth Unions”, but A.P. Chekhov wrote a little earlier in the story “ My Life ”. So the relevance of the slogan was not eliminated. First you need to be able to draw a horse, and then become an abstractionist and move away from reality if you want. This is the path, for example, of Kandinsky. You . It’s easier, of course, to immediately become an abstraction genius, that’s understandable. And we have plenty of such artists.

It’s the same in prose: you don’t need to be able to do anything, you don’t need to know anything either. Weave something, no matter what. What a reality! This smacks of realism and plotting. Read " Anna Karenina ", think at your leisure, is it close to reality or far? An anthology compiled by Denezhkina has just been published, the best text by Liliya Kim “Anya Karenina” - it has many shortcomings, but it was written with an attitude of “closeness to reality”, and I think this is the reason for the relative success of this work.

RJ: Unlike most critics, you welcomed the award of the Booker Prize to Lyudmila Ulitskaya two years ago. Do you disagree that Ulitskaya’s prose is an advanced version of a women’s novel? And how relevant is the division of literature into “reading” and “serious” literature in general for you?

M.Z.: Ulitskaya’s prose eventually became an advanced women’s novel, but I remember her prose of the initial period (I even believe that I “discovered” Ulitskaya, that is, I was one of the first to write about her “largely”), and this projection increased my assessment of the prize-winning work, “The Case of Kukotsky,” which is already more ordinary than the texts of the early Ulitskaya, but also not bad. I then not only welcomed the award of the prize, I even before the prize was given, I wrote in Moscow News that the prize should be given to Ulitskaya, there was simply no one else . It’s rare when you guess right with Booker, but here it coincided.

The division into “reading” and “not reading,” that is, “serious” literature, is relevant; publishing practice forces writers to produce “reading,” and as a result, literature is degrading. This is the opposition of the secondary and the original. The Akunin project is a cancerous tumor on the body of literature, a meaningless stylization introduced by zombifying buyers. These texts are devoid of artistic value. Well, he pulled out words from somewhere, plots, motives, “studied everyday life”, molded something out of all this - but why, if there is original literature for which he is trying to write? It’s clear: he wants money. However, from an artistic point of view, this is the same “dry wank” that the academician talks about in the finale of “ Nikolai Nikolaevich ” by Yuz Aleshkovsky. Maybe it is comfortable for someone to read Akunin due to the primitiveness of this reading material, but this is an imitation of literature. “There will always be bad writers, because they meet the taste of undeveloped, immature people; these latter, just like mature people, have their own needs” ( Nietzsche F. Collected works. Vol. IV. Human, all too human. M. , 1901. P. 180; aphorism # 201 ). The "boots" have had success with this reading, because being a fool now is not shameful, but easy and pleasant, this is generally the style of the Putin era, the mainstream. It is boring to develop this topic due to its obviousness. Previously, telling the truth was easy and pleasant, but now being a fool and lying in public is easy and pleasant. Fools gathered in a pack are the electorate, etc.

RJ: Your latest book is devoted to the analysis of the poems of Nikolai Kononov and is structured as a dialogue between the critic and the poet himself. Why did you choose Kononov among modern authors?

M.Z.: We have known each other since 1989, when we were accepted into the Union of Writers of the USSR together, and we met while waiting for the decision of the selection committee. I don't know many people, but this is an exception. Kononov turned out to be, on the one hand, a classic narcissist, never tired of talking and thinking about himself, on the other hand, he found the strength to be quite frank. I couldn’t understand anything in Kononov’s poems for a long time and thought that after we all died, he would be published in the “Poet’s Library,” but the unfortunate commentator of 2100 won’t understand a damn thing about these poems. Then I thought: why rack my brains myself, if Kononov is still alive, let him explain. That’s what I suggested: I don’t analyze, but force the poet to analyze his text himself. But Nikolai Mikhailovich liked it, he’s a narcissist, and he’s only really interested in himself, his texts, thoughts, articles about his texts, my thoughts about articles about his texts, etc. Thanks to Kononov, the book turned out to be interesting, he’s great. And smart, and talented, and brave. Can you imagine what would happen, for example, with such a donkey as “Skushner”?

RJ: Which tradition of Russian criticism do you consider yours? What genres, styles, methodologies do you lack in modern criticism and, more broadly, in philology?

M.Z.: What traditions in Russian criticism do you know? They would call it... I like the early Korney Chukovsky. This is not a tradition, this is an individual style. I have no complaints or demands regarding modern criticism. It's been boring to read it for a long time, I don't need it. Know the opinion or interpretation of Andrei Nemzer or Alexander Arkhangelsky , Natalia Ivanova or Alla Latynina ? Why, what am I going to do about it? Argue? I don’t communicate with them in real life, so why would I argue in absentia?

Philology as a whole lacks serious commentary work. Here is the text, and here is a commentary on it, detailed, “Talmudic,” methodologically reflected (see articles by Roman Timenchik and Omri Ronen on this topic). Basically, everyone is in a hurry and slacking. Receive a grant, report... The topic should be convenient, otherwise you won’t be able to do it in a year, so they write about basically nothing. People have no time to work: trips, lectures, presentations. Hence the meager results. Say, collections of irresponsible essays instead of research. Too many books appear without indexes, that's what's really bad, the rest doesn't matter.

PS (Mikhail Edelshtein)

To understand Zolotonosov the critic, one must turn to the works of Zolotonosov the researcher. It is traditionally believed that the latter has two topics: “Zolotonosov is good in everything, but especially in two topics - sex and Jews (for him they are one and the same),” writes the ExLibris reviewer , who prudently hid from Zolotonosov’s anger behind his initials V.M. In fact, Zolotonosov is interested in not two, but three topics: sex, Jews and politics. That is, the culprits are: Freudianism, anti-Semitism and... politics. However, there is no difference between them for the author.

But we are not talking about topics, but about methodology. The arsenal of Zolotonosov the philologist consists of several techniques, united primarily by their suitability for reducing a complex whole to the simplest primary elements. The researcher’s favorite psychoanalysis in relation to art is an openly reductionist methodology, as L.S. Vygotsky wrote best: “The trouble is that in this case one writer will turn out to be fatally similar to another.” This is exactly what happens to the characters of our author. According to Zolotonosov, Boris Eichenbaum suffered from a complex of the “unloved son” - the consequences of child psychological trauma , Leo Landau “constantly and exhaustively proved his potential ”, and Daniel Harms tormented the “ castration images ”. Probably, all this is true to one degree or another, but we love all three not only for this.

The search for subtexts of anti-Semitic or political leads, in general, to a similar result. Judophobe writers are similar to each other as happy families. Antistalin writers are all the more.

But Zolotonosov reaches the maximum simplicity precisely in criticism. It is hardly among today's observers that you can find a person who can compete with him in the sequence of the denial of the current liter. The trunk idea of ​​the Golden-Critic, which he wrote about, comes down to one phrase in the end: to shoot everyone. What is easy to understand. For more than ten years from a week a week to write about the subject you hated - you can go crazy.

It is necessary to pay tribute to Zolotonosov - in recent years he has not missed, it seems, not a single work that deserves the attention of the work: the awarding of Boker Mikhail Shishkin for the "capture of Ishmael" (a thing "in the sense of literary quality ... much worse than" Siberia "by George Markov or any novel by Yuri Bondarev ")" showed that, as before, the prize is not a romance with certain artistic qualities, but an influential literary and publishing (magazine) group "who nominated its author"; "The haze lays on the old steps" Alexander Chudakov - "pale memories, clothed in the form of unemotional prose"; Sergey Gandlevsky’s novel “NRZB” is written quite densely . ” I hope we have not forgotten anyone from the best Russian writers of the turn of the century? Ah, yes: as Zolotonosov assesses Alexander Kushner and Dmitry Bykov, everyone can find out directly from the interview printed above.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of true in the negative program of Zolotonosov. And when he suggests "recognizing that there are very few writers who should be printed, in principle, there are not enough of them for all magazines and all breeding bonuses, that two or three stories for a year are the norm, that one good novel is in two years old - This is the “renewal of the plan” - I absolutely agree with him (only for some reason the novels of good ones have become more than stories - with little prose, I would have agreed with no less pleasure with its positive program. , but the trouble is - Zolotonosov hides it and keeps the names of those same stories in strict secret.

You can see in this adherence to the glorious St. Petersburg tradition: the writers of the northern capital Anfan Anfan Terribliste . But even the main rival of Zolotonosov is Viktor Toporov, besides what scolds everyone, also builds his own liter process, on the side of the general. I really do not like Russian literature in the version of the Limbus Press publishing house, as well as what is happening around the "National Bestseller", but Toporov, at least, is trying to contrast something in the trends in Russian literature, with which he is fighting as a critic . Zolotonosov remains the only one, in modern Russian criticism, the genius of pure denial. Unless, of course, not to consider a positive program to describe the relationship of the Ural Limiter and Shepet Governor in the manner of Andrei Platonov (“I’m better to use you in the manner of Nikolai Nekrasov,” as one of the Venedikt Heroes said).

The paradox is that the simplest models are not devoid of contradictions. It is strange to blame the "free -sided" prize named after Andrei Bely in the "desperate lies intended for sponsors." Just as it is strange to complain about the shortage of "serious commentary work" and immediately dismissively respond to Gleb Moreva - Morish's commentary on the diary of Mikhail Kuzmin in 1934 remains one of the samples of the genre .

And the interview ... Well, what an interview ... "As for the complexes of Zolotonosov related to his imagination, I think that they really take place, I think that the assumption of this can be expressed in the press, because Mikhail himself is not shy about such matters . I am replacing "dyscusans" with "interviewers" and, under the words of the glory of Kuritsyn, I subscribe.