This is criticism

This is criticism
Issue 12


Publication date: August 15, 2003

We continue to publish conversations with literary critics. Today the guest of the column is Dmitry Bavilsky .

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Russian Journal: Dmitry Vladimirovich, you have collaborated with Russian Journal for many years, but in recent months you have not been in the Reading Circle. What happened to "Catachrese"?

Dmitry Bavilsky: “Catachresis” continues, the project is not finished, the regularity has simply disappeared. I think it will be resumed from time to time, as occasions arise. The fact is that for this section I initially chose a format that required a fairly significant volume and conceptual richness. And the current cultural and literary contexts are sparse, and occasions arise infrequently.

RJ: Are there really so few reasons? But what about Kuritsyn’s statement that Bavilsky is the second person after Nemzer who reads all published texts?

D.B.: That is why I have the right to say so.

RJ: Do you really read almost everything that comes out?

D.B.: I try to read almost everything that comes out. This is a matter of professional integrity. Either you take your plot and dig it up, or you talk about the process as a whole, but then you must present it as completely as possible.

Although now I have begun to read much less thick magazines. When I lived in Chelyabinsk, I subscribed to all the “fat men” and read every issue almost from cover to cover. Now it’s a pity to waste energy and time on magazines, into which no matter how much you throw a net, it still won’t bring anything interesting. If a critic wants to write an abusive text, then the most direct way is to open the latest issue of any magazine, find something suitable there and criticize it.

Another thing is that I try not to scold anyone; I practically never write negative reviews. I generally try not to make judgments. If I write about a text, it doesn't mean I like it or don't like it. It is important for me to disassemble the work and show how it is structured, to reveal the technique, the author’s intention. And a person, based on my analysis, will decide for himself whether to read this text or not. I am not so arrogant as to think that it is important for everyone to know what I think on this or that matter; the reader is interested in information, and not the opinion of another person, even if presented with reason. That’s why I prefer to avoid speaking directly. It seems to me that expressing your position when you are not asked about it is vulgar. This is especially true for socio-political problems. Does it really matter what housewives think about housing and communal services reform? My position is quite transparent, it can be easily read from my texts, but speaking out directly seems excessive to me. I haven’t written a word about “Mr. Hexogen”, and this is also a manifestation of my position.

The fact is that when you exist within a context, within this field, your criteria change, you can no longer be a normal, simple-minded reader. I don't remember the last time I read without a pencil. This is normal, this is a cost of the profession, but it also deprives you of the right to act as a recommender. You have to remember that you have a different approach, a different look. Within the professional environment, everything is perceived differently. Well, just imagine: postmodernism interferes with someone’s life. From the point of view of normal everyday experience, this looks wild - I would like your problems, Mr. Professor.

Therefore, when people come up to me and ask what they should read , this question perplexes me. What I like is unlikely to be interesting to my work colleagues or girlfriends at the club. And I try to answer something like: “Well, read Akunin.”

Returning to the beginning: I am interested in analyzing the text, seeing how it is structured. I allow myself direct assessments only in rare cases when they are needed to more clearly indicate my position. When I just “can’t be silent” anymore. But even if I write a sharply negative review, this does not mean that I have a bad attitude towards this or that character. In general, I treat people well, I’m kind.

RJ: Yes, I also have a good attitude towards them, until they start writing... It always seemed to me that you criticize thick magazines more out of generational solidarity, for company or something. But in fact, half of the texts you praised were from thick magazines.

D.B.: Thick magazines , of course, have a right to exist . In terms of its concept, this institute is generally very good, the idea itself is good: to unite the entire country into a single reading field. Another thing is that in today’s situation, “fat people” do not fulfill their functions and have turned into a kind of settling tank for Soviet-style writers. But what you are talking about is connected, rather, with something else. I lived two thousand kilometers from Moscow, books are difficult to get there, and “fat people” are fat people everywhere.

And by the way, I also praise quite rarely. A couple of times I received letters like: “I bought a book based on your recommendation, and it disappointed me.” I can't force people to spend their money. A thorough, detailed analysis should not be misleading. I read the meanings, and do not give out grades, I don’t have to like or dislike the source text, most often I have a completely neutral attitude towards the texts I analyze. More often. I feel warmth not for the texts, but for the people who write them. What is important to me is not the texts, but the positive aspects of writers that appear in their works. People write to show their best side. Therefore, communicating with them through their texts is a pleasure.

RJ: It seems to me that of the critics of your generation, you are closest in type to a critic of the old school, to a traditional thick-magazine columnist.

D.B.: Yes, I was brought up on this type of criticism. For me, a critical review is something fundamental, conceptual, with half-page quotations, like Belinsky . I yearn for this type of criticism; I regret that it is not in demand today. That newspaper and magazine lightweight approach that is now widespread actually has little to do with criticism; it is increasingly shifting towards book marketing.

In general, if we talk about this, the situation in criticism today is terrifying. Criticism essentially dies, becomes mummified, and something monstrous happens to the profession. In any magazine there are flocks of boys and girls who believe that they have the right to evaluate everyone, but who at the same time have neither an aesthetic nor an ethical system (one with the other, of course, is closely interconnected). And if one of them has such a system, then he cannot demonstrate it, approve it, or develop his own context to justify it. The format of modern publications does not allow a critic, especially a novice critic who does not yet have a serious name, such an opportunity. This is what I am doing now in " Topos ", in the "Egoist's Library" - I set my context, outline the literary field that seems acceptable to me. Adjusted for the financial capabilities of Topos. It is very important for me to bring together beginning authors and established “old-timers” on one platform, to feed both of them at the expense of each other. But not everyone has their own “Topos”. And that’s why old people today are increasingly pupating and turning into caricatures of themselves, but there is no new generation of critics. Over the past ten years, almost no one serious has appeared.

But a large number of people have entered the profession who, it seems to me, simply do not have the right to write. Cursing in order to sublimate accumulated negative energy, or praising because you drink vodka together is not criticism. At the same time, those we are talking about often simply do not know how to express their thoughts. Elementary mistakes appear at the level of syntax or composition, when the input, which should occupy no more than a few lines, spreads over two-thirds of the text. There is a sharp drop in the level of writing, not to mention the fact that people do not have any skills in parsing texts and the ability to do this.

Another problem is that many young critics simply don't know the context. If Lev Danilkin admires “Kysya ,” it means he is not aware that all this was already done ten to twenty years ago, by a variety of people, from the Strugatskys to American dystopians. Anyone who knows the context cannot admire such a secondary and esoteric thing.

Let's move on. Modern culture is so interpenetrable that it is difficult to comprehend the literary situation without knowledge of the processes taking place in cinema or theater. A critic must be able to talk about a book against the backdrop of a puppet show or a Hollywood blockbuster. The reader knows all this; he exists in a cultural field shaped by a variety of things, from politics to show business. In addition, such a view helps to understand why, say, literature today is losing to cinema. And most critics voluntarily impose strange shop restrictions on themselves and are afraid to talk about anything other than literature.

But the main problem of modern criticism, perhaps, is that the system of examination has not been built up. Thick magazines, which previously played this role, have moved to the periphery. Publishing houses, due to their commercial orientation, are not going to do this. The function of examination is transferred to the institute of awards, which also fails to cope with it due to bias and clannishness of the literary space, due to the lack of interest in everything new. Look at how other professional communities are structured; among art critics, for example, such a range of opinions is impossible; there is more room for consensus there.

RJ: At the same time, half of the art community believes that Brener should be imprisoned, and the other half sees in him the art of the 21st century.

D.B.: They have different attitudes towards Brener, but everyone there clearly knows that Shilov or Glazunov are bad artists. But here you can defend some Senchin in all seriousness . Criticism will be in demand by society when a clearer system develops within it. Now there is no such system, there is no publication similar to the Segodnya newspaper of 1993-96, where Boris Kuzminsky, Andrei Nemzer, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn coexisted and where the diversity of opinions formed into a certain system that people could trust. It was the pinnacle project of Russian cultural journalism; now nothing like it exists, there is no publication playing a generalizing role.

There is no system of criteria; all that glitters is gold. Therefore, there cannot be unconditional successes, there cannot be unconditional failures. What's happening in literature? There is no single space. There are several fields that intersect very weakly or do not intersect at all. Separately, “Znamya” and “New World”, separately “Zvezda” and “Neva”, even further, on the outskirts, “Our Contemporary” and “Moscow”. And there is no criticism capable of uniting these fields and marginalizing those who are not aligned.

RJ: You started out as a paper critic, then you settled on the Internet for a long time. Is there a difference for you between online and paper criticism?

D.B.: At the level of writing, practically none. The difference, rather, is in the speed of delivery, in the speed of reaction to your text. When I was sitting in Chelyabinsk and writing for newspapers, I was throwing bottles into the ocean. I didn’t know the opinion of the professional community or reader responses...

RJ: In my opinion, after the publication of Oleg Proskurin’s article “ Anatomy of Bavilsky ” and your answer, you received such a “return” on the RJ forum that the person who experienced this should now shudder for the rest of his life at the word “interactivity”...

D.B.: Yes, then I got the full program. But it was a rewarding experience. If you are a public figure, you must take the blow, you must grow some skin. But then, when I started writing novels and the reaction to them was ambiguous, this no longer affected me at all.

In general, the feeling of the publication for which you are writing shapes the image of the future text. Everything is important here, from the type of paper to the layout and the authors who may end up on the next page. And this is not a conscious process. Rather, in hindsight I read my feelings from my own text. But suddenly a certain playfulness appears in it or, conversely, burdensome syntactic constructions appear out of the blue.

RJ: Does philological education help a modern critic?

D.B.: Of course, it makes it possible to formulate your own method. The method develops spontaneously, but then, looking back, you understand how your philological education and self-education influenced it. Now I see that I was greatly influenced by Russian formalists, Tartu semioticians, French structuralists and poststructuralists. They provide a categorical apparatus. Another thing is that then you have to pay attention to the style, avoid the temptation to trump terms, “to ramble on Derrida,” but now, it seems to me, I have already gotten rid of this. The style can be cleaned up, but the method remains.

RJ: It seems to me that older critics are concerned with how to explain to the reader what they need to read. That is, they act as a kind of authorized representative of the writer. And you and your peers, rather, speak on behalf of the reader, they are trying to tell the writer how he needs to write so that it is interesting to read. This is true?

D.B.: It seems to me that this is not entirely true. It's very easy to be smarter than a writer. Since I am one in two persons, I write both critical articles and novels, I see that everyone strives to explain to the writer how to write. It is very easy, when the text is already ready, to go through it with your all-seeing eye. But let's imagine that the text is born out of nothing. There is only a white sheet of paper or a blank computer screen, without a single word. And a person, at his own peril and risk, creates a certain system that either will work or will not. And here for me the sacred rule is Pushkin’s requirement to judge the artist according to the laws that he recognized over himself. Only based on these laws can one say where a person has held out and where his plan is stalling.

The text is highly self-reflective. The critic's task is to find those moments in the text where he blurts out and begins to comment on himself. And when this is successful, the formula of the text or the metaphor of what the text is appears. Therefore, for myself, I call my method psychoanalysis without reliance on libido.

When an author starts to write something, for some reason he does it, for some reason he writes this way and not otherwise. Kant said that if a person has brown glasses, then he sees the world in brown. So the critic must understand what glasses the writer has. If Joyce makes the hero of his brick Jewish, then in this way he is trying to emphasize his own exile, his own alienation from the Irish context. If a person suddenly starts writing a utopia, dystopia or a fantasy novel, you understand that for him this is a means of escaping reality. And the paths he takes from reality allow me to understand something both in the text itself and in the writer himself.

The text, in fact, is secondary and not always important. Text is a good way to communicate with people. And the person, the author, comes first. And with the help of my critical text, I try to communicate with the person who wrote the work of art that became the subject of my reflection.

RJ: Do you see the reader when you sit down at the table?

D.B.: Of course, I take the reader into account; this is one of the basic settings. But everyone understands responsibility to the reader in their own way. Yes, I try to write clear texts in a language that people understand, avoid terminology, describe the context, and not pretend that everyone knows it by default.

RJ: And who is the addressee of the ideal critical text - the reader, the writer, the critic himself?

D.B.: Perhaps the ideal addressee is the editor. Editors are those ideal readers who make up, in the words of Irina Rodnyanskaya , the “knowledge environment.” It is they who ultimately form the context and set certain rules of the game. I was probably lucky with my editors.

In general, I write, first of all, for myself. It is important for me to explain to myself the anatomy of a particular text. If I can clearly explain this to myself, then I can explain it to the reader and interest him.

RJ: Since we are talking about editors and anatomy, it is difficult not to once again recall Proskurin’s article, which was based on an analysis of your excessively metaphorical, in Proskurin’s opinion, style. In addition to communication problems, does a critic solve some artistic problems?

D.B.: Absolutely. Firstly, artistic means of expression involve significant linguistic economy and free the text from heavy syntactic structures. Metaphor is a compressed meaning, compressed information. Second, tropes are by definition suggestive and therefore give the reader more room for interpretation. And the act of interpretation is the act of appropriating the text. The text thus becomes closer to the reader. Further. Metaphor allows you to avoid saying the last words. The reader can include his own feelings in this metaphorical series, can inhabit this metaphor, develop it in the direction that is important for him. Therefore, metaphor is the most subtle tool for describing a literary text.

I've already said that I try to avoid judgment, so I would like the text to flicker and be perceived differently by different people, so that everyone sees it differently. This is the respect for the reader we were talking about. Artistic means of expressiveness make it possible to escape from the author's dictate, from edification, and attitude. Who am I to give my reader certain guidelines? I can only give him food for thought.

But metaphor for me is only one of the tools for interpreting a work, which I use along with others. I wouldn’t say that my texts are impressionistic; it seems to me that they are built on very clearly defined theses.

RJ: Now many critics, including you, have begun to write fiction. As a critic, does this hinder or help you?

D.B.: It feels like it exists on different planes, although in hindsight you realize that when you write a literary text, you act as a critic who sees a niche for what he does. It seems to me that one of the main literary problems today is the lack of a novel mainstream. Most of the published texts are simply boring for the reader, this is such an endless Makanin . In the Western tradition there is a normally developed fictional line, but we lack this. We have very few novels that do not rape the reader with “the moral quest of our contemporaries” (Felix Kuznetsov had such a formula), but tell some kind of story. Entertaining is the politeness of a writer. And to put some kind of philosophy or ideology under the wrong side of the plot is already a matter of writing skill.

The writer cannot teach the reader, that time has passed. Today, the writer has ceased to be a religious figure and his truth has ceased to be more important than the reader’s truth. It follows from this that the writer’s task is to captivate and entertain. Tell the reader an interesting story for bedtime. Therefore, I try to lay the foundation of my artistic works with metaphors that can be read both at the plot and at the ideological level. This applies less to my first novel, The Nightshade Family , which is still a debut, and more to The Potato Eaters , Angels First, and the novel I am writing now.

RJ: What is mainstream for you?

D.B.: I understand the mainstream as normal literature for normal people, entertaining stories for the middle class. As a rule, these are books about modernity, about the ordinary life of ordinary people. It is difficult to write about modernity, it is fluid, it eludes fixation, so its description is transferred to the grassroots, tabloid genres. But I’m interested in trying to write about this from a different point of view, without bandits and prostitutes, as if without a special informational reason. Write about a normal life in which, at first glance, nothing happens.

In Western literature, this niche is occupied, for example, by Iris Murdoch or John Fowles. They are not highbrow authors, but quite mainstream ones. Here the problem arises of the difference in living standards and general culture. In Chelyabinsk there is an association “Play, Harmony!”, and all the festivities are accompanied by an accordion player, and Pavarotti performs in New York’s Central Park. The higher the level of general culture, the higher the level of the literary mainstream. Our transition period will never end; the middle class has not been formed, and its needs are not clear to itself. That’s why we have such chaos at the level of the stage, advertising, etc.

RJ: Your novel was longlisted for the Booker this year. And as a critic, can you say who you would like to see (next to you, of course) in the final six?

D.B.: I definitely won’t get on the short list. I have written more than once that in order to get the Booker, you need to move to Moscow...

RJ: But now you’ve moved, it’s time to receive awards... In addition, the jury consists of your colleagues, so they won’t offend their fellow workers?

D.B.: Well, I haven’t gotten to Moscow yet... As for the second point, everything is completely the opposite. The reaction to my first novel was so “ambiguous” that you could kill yourself if you didn’t know what was behind it all. If I hadn’t worked in this business for ten years and didn’t know all my colleagues like crazy, I wouldn’t know whose orders they work on and which publishing houses they are associated with and which they don’t like, it would be a monstrous disappointment. “The Paslenov Family” was published by the OGI - at the very moment when it began to actively develop and step on the heels of UFO with its scientific books and Ad Marginem with its artistic project. Of course, I was kicked, among other things, also because I dared to publish a book in a publishing house that was disturbing too many people.

RJ: So what about the shortlist?

D.B.: The problem is that awards, including the Booker, are given not for texts, but for the party, for reputation. To be fair, the shortlist should include “Spelling” by Dmitry Bykov, probably “Kazarosa” by Leonid Yuzefovich... It’s difficult to talk about this, because as a critic I can’t stop calculating the layout, I can’t help but make allowances for the composition jury. The purity of the experiment is lost.

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PS (Mikhail Edelshtein)

Dmitry Bavilsky is a vivid example of how difficult it is for a critic who has not guessed the date of his birth. Well, why should he be born twenty years earlier and by the mid-70s seriously and permanently register on the pages of “Friendship of Peoples” or “New World”? And today we would remember him separated by a comma with Lev Anninsky , Natalya Ivanova or - who the hell is not joking - Sergei Chuprinin himself .

But Bavilsky was born in 1969. And as a result, he got stuck, like Winnie the Pooh in the hole of the hospitable Rabbit - neither here nor there. It does not belong to any camp, it exists somewhere in between. For young people, he is too conservative in his ideas about literature; for older people, he is too radical in his tastes and unusual in his writing style. In ARSS he occupies the honorable position of enfanteurrible and shaker of foundations; among advanced ex-libris children he is classified as “retarded daddy.”

And no one is to blame for this confusion except Bavilsky himself. It was he who confused everyone. He swears at the words “postmodernism” and “simulacrum”, talks about the hard work of the text and its existential confirmation, while demanding that Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin and Pelageya Fandorina be recognized as great Russian writers. He stigmatizes the sixties, snorts at the words “thick magazines” like some Lev Pirogov, while he himself writes only about them, and in the intervals between reviews of “fat magazines,” like the last sixties, he nostalgically recalls radio voices. No matter how many years he’s been living on the Internet, he still hasn’t developed the proper admiration for interactivity. Without any network democracy, he builds forum regulars : they say, “you should first enter the professional community, make a name and reputation there, and only then start learning to write.” Try to figure it out here, classify it.

Once, in his protest, Bavilsky went so far that, by his own candid admission, he “decided to act in the unusual role of a liberal publicist”: he told people about “the monstrous harm caused by the viruses launched by Mr. Vysotsky into Russian culture,” and To complete the picture, he explained that “Shulpyakov is a beautiful and living poet, but Vladimir Vysotsky is dead and dangerous.” At this point it’s time to shout after Stanislavsky: “I don’t believe it!” Liberal journalists don’t express themselves that way. Bavilsky squeezed it, and that’s how he came out. Nikolai Pereyaslov, I remember, had an article like this: “Should I listen to Vysotsky at night?”...

In fact, there are no particular contradictions in all this. We just need to get back to where we started. Bavilsky is a typical thick-magazine columnist who unexpectedly appeared in the generation of today's thirty-year-olds, seemingly lost to normal criticism. Senior comrade Vyacheslav Kuritsyn once said about Bavilsky: “There is a lot of service in his activities.” Oddly enough, the pure truth. Bavilsky is perhaps the only person in his generation capable of sacrificial, if you will, service, service not to himself, but to literature.

For ten years he has been heroically building his model of the literary process. Builds in "Segodnya", in "Literature", in "Nezavisimaya", in RJ, in "Topos". He is engaged in a tug-of-war with Nemzer. The words “sacrifice” and “heroism” are all the more appropriate here because despite ten years of experience, obvious analytical talent, and rare ability to work, almost no one believes Bavilsky. In the eyes of the “connoisseurs,” his model of the literary process does not coincide with reality - and that’s all. Of course, not everyone believes Nemzer either, but for the most part they hide it. Because he has a mustache and a gun. And about Bavilsky they say out loud everything they think. As a rule, without mincing words. And he builds everything.

And this painstaking work to create one’s own literary field evokes quiet admiration. Bavilsky’s ability to read everything that comes out is especially striking. If I master one novel by a modern Russian author, then I go around like Gogol for six months, carrying my own heroism before me on outstretched arms. And Bavilsky really reads everything: prose writers, poets, playwrights, memoirists. He also looks into the classics. Monitors the translations. He does not disdain theorists. Watches films. He understands the theater. He talks to Oleg Kulik about beauty, and he doesn’t bite him, on the contrary, he wags his tail. But all is the same: no one believes. This is what it means to be born at the wrong time.