This is criticism

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

Russian Magazine: Lev Alexandrovich, how do you define yourself or, to use a fashionable word, position yourself? Who are you - publicist, critic, writer?

Lev Anninsky: By origin - a literary critic. Then it turned out that it was unclear who I was. They explained to me that I was an essayist. Now, when my students write something they don't understand and ask me what they wrote, I explain to them that it is an essay.

RJ: What is the main difference between an essay and a critical article for you?

L.A.: A literary critic is obliged to judge the author, to give him an assessment. I don’t feel I have the right to judge anyone. I talk about what happens in me when I read someone else's text. They say it's an essay.

RJ: Many people write about the influence that Rozanov had on you. Is this a conscious orientation?

L.A.: Conscious orientation comes after the unconscious. This is what happened to me with Rozanov. Although, consciously, Berdyaev probably gave me more. But in the unconscious, of course, Rozanov. This is what Vasily Vasilyevich wanted - to influence the unconscious.

RJ: Is your position in life, in particular, your readiness to publish in publications that are opposite in direction, also connected with your “course towards Rozanov”?

L.A.: Yes, I am really ready to be published - and have been published - simultaneously in the newspaper " Zavtra " and the newspaper " Segodnya ", and in Soviet times in the magazines " October " and " New World ". This is hardly directly connected with Rozanov, I just unconsciously feel disgust for Russian schismatics and their extreme positions. Rozanov just helped me realize this. And then I covered myself with them.

RJ: You have repeatedly mentioned in various texts the twelve-year-old division into “democratic” and “patriotic” writers’ unions. Why do you keep coming back to this episode? For you, is this some kind of significant metaphor, a symbol of what happened to literature in the 1990s?

L.A.: No, not a metaphor. This split disgusted me and still disgusts me. The trouble is that this relates not only to Russian literature of recent years. This is the usual state of a Russian person - he does not want to sit next to anyone on the same field. And I am ready to sit with anyone, because I was born and live here, and I have no other people. That’s why I don’t like it when schismatics shout that they won’t sit down with someone. We must learn to tolerate people. They tolerate me.

RJ: In 1997 , a columnist for the Kommersant newspaper wrote: “Anninsky, the most famous literary critic of the 60s-80s, has ceased to be relevant today...” This phrase was even included in an encyclopedic article about you...

L.A.: What does “the most” mean? I'm not the number one critic. I'm a critic without a number. You can assume that my number is zero. I don't want to know if I'm the best or not the best and what place I occupy.

RJ: What do you think about the second part of this statement? Do you feel involved in the current literary process?

L.A. Of course, the process that took place in the 60-80s is more personal to me. “I was younger then, I think I was better...” And then it was all over, we were dragged away, trampled, spat upon. I wiped myself off, said: “God’s dew,” and began to look closely and listen.

What was happening did not seem to me to be a literary process. But since you and I are now sitting behind the scenes of the House of Composers, where Viktor Shenderovich’s literary evening has just ended, I can say: Shenderovich, of course, does not create a literary process, but the fact that the audience listened to him so kindly and applauded him so much inspires some hope.

RJ : What names do you associate with your idea of ​​today’s literary process? A reader who follows your column in “ Friendship of Peoples ” or reads your other texts is unlikely to understand how you feel about certain current literary figures. Those about whom you write are predominantly marginal - these are people who are either on the margins of the literary process or completely outside it, in the so-called “near abroad”.

L.A.: If I write about writers who are on the margins, it is because I feel myself on the margins. I don’t want to be at the center of the process, I don’t want to be responsible for it, I don’t want to be given a number, I don’t want anyone to say whether I’m participating in the literary process or whether I “majesticly missed it”, as they wrote in another encyclopedia. It doesn't matter. I'm just talking about what's happening in me. I'm interested in talking. If other people are interested in this, I am grateful to them.

RJ: Several years ago you were chairman of the Booker jury. This year you were a member of the jury of the Apollo Grigoriev Prize. So, do you still have your own model of the literary process, do you have some criteria by which you evaluate current literature?

L.A.: You give a prize to the one who is more talented. And if I have several equally talented and interesting texts in front of me, as was then on the Booker shortlist, then I vote for the one who is closer to me. In response to the decision of that Booker jury, they called me a stinking sixties. I agreed.

RJ: Do you mean the Booker was awarded to Bulat Okudzhava ?

L.A.: Yes, of course. I can also name the name of the person who said that the sixties smell bad: Dmitry Galkovsky , who smells good. In general, he is a very gifted person...

RJ: And he also focuses on Rozanov...

L.A.: Absolutely, so we smell the same.

RJ: Well, for a follower of Rozanov, this is rather a compliment... Recently, at one literary meeting, I listened to an almost biblical formula addressed to me: “Anninsky gave birth to Chuprinin , Chuprinin gave birth to Ageev , and Ageev - you.”

L.A.: Who did I give birth to?

RJ: Chuprinina, according to rumors.

L.A.: Interesting. Apparently it was a painless birth, so I didn’t notice it.

RJ: How do you look at the generation of your great-grandchildren, at today’s literary criticism?

L.A.: When I was younger than you, I determined the quality of a text through critical articles about it according to a very simple scheme: if they praise it, it means it’s crap, if they criticize it, it means it’s interesting. Then I discovered that sometimes they criticize crap, and from time to time they even praise good things. Then I learned to sniff texts. It is not at all necessary to read everything. If you are inside the situation, if you feel the process, if you see the dynamics and know that Vasily Belov is moving from “Business as usual” to “Everything is ahead”, then you understand what to expect from him next. I know what to expect from whom. And if this is confirmed by one paragraph, then you don’t have to read further, I’m guessing correctly anyway.

Criticism also helps me in this general orientation. If Chuprinin wrote about Kozhinov as I expected, then everything is in order, but if suddenly something unexpected appears in his text, then something has changed; then I delve into it and figure out what the essence of the change is.

But if I write about some text, I read it completely differently. I read it as if from scratch, I experience every letter, I must know absolutely everything in it. I will not evaluate this text, I will say what happened in me in connection with reading this text. And no criticism is a decree for me here.

RJ: How does modern criticism, in your opinion, differ from the one you are talking about?

L.A.: Party life. They are all in parties, in caudles, they are all, as a rule, schismatics, they pour bile on strangers and are infuriated by their own. That's why I can't love them. Among modern critics there are very sophisticated, very talented, brilliantly educated people. But I don't like the ruthlessness in them. I myself am a compassionate and, excuse the expression, sentimental person. I'm ashamed to say, I feel sorry for people. I cannot tell a mediocre person that he is mediocre. I can not.

RJ: But have you ever written negative reviews?

L.A.: Well, what do negative reviews mean?! I laughed along with the reader, everyone felt what it was about, but I could not open my mouth and tell someone that they did not correspond to something. I myself don't measure up to too many things. And they flaunt ruthlessness. This is their common attitude. Well, and besides, I don’t like it when a person in relation to the text acts as a judge, recommender, or, on the contrary, a whistleblower, when the critic must, in order to attract attention, say: “The name is mediocre, although everyone thinks that he is something costs". No matter how brilliant the study of one or another of the modern critics, I lack in them the depth of experience. The ultimate goal is not the same! And when the ultimate task is close to me, then it doesn’t matter whether the text the critic writes about is good or bad, I still begin to delve into it. Whether I agree or not doesn't matter anymore.

There are my peers, critics who are still making waves: there is Rassadin , there is Zolotussky , there is the same Chuprinin. Again, I know very well what and why they are worried. And then there are the new generation of critics who feel like messengers of ruthlessness. This is not mine, and I don’t delve into it. Those who come to castigate writers are not interesting to me. I'm interested in something else. I am interested in reality itself, how it is written and experienced.

I don’t know if I understand today’s literary critics correctly. To be honest, I don’t really read them right now. I read more memoirists, philosophers, political scientists, and journalists. There are brilliant people here, for example, Dima Bykov , who considers himself my spiritual son - he is multi-talented, he is a wonderful publicist, a very interesting poet. So there are plenty of talented people.

RJ: Reviewing the magazine “Continent”, you once wrote : “I will take journalism, and bypass prose and poetry...” . Similar or similar phrases appear in many of your articles. Is this a principled position? Are you really more interested in thinking about what is happening to us using literary material than in observing the poetics of the text?

L.A.: Yes, this is really more interesting to me, at least now. And I can explain why. The fact is that people who rely on artistic fiction differ from me in terms of their ultimate goal. They want to win a place in the literary sun. Once upon a time I also wanted to, whether I won or not is a different question. People who strive to win a place in the literary sun have the right to do so, but this is not interesting to me. That's why I don't read them. Let them break through without me.

In addition, I am disgusted by the current dominance of cheap fiction and pulp fiction. In this area there are knowledgeable people, like Marinina, skilled people, like Dontsova , but they serve the consumer. I am not a participant in this process... Daria Dontsova had her own program on the radio, and I was invited there. That's how we met her. I saw a very nice young woman, a graduate of my native journalism department. We had a nice talk, she did a wonderful radio show, and I wanted to say something nice to her. “Agrippina Arkadyevna,” I said (her real name is Agrippina, she is the daughter of the famous Soviet writer Arkady Vasilyev), “there are a lot of your books in our house.” She replied: “ I ask you not to read them .” Good girl! This is why I don’t read such texts: the smarter authors themselves ask not to do this.

RJ: But still, when you are dealing with an artistically sound text, are you more interested in reading some kind of social message from it or talking about its poetics?

L.A.: Neither one nor the other. I can read a social message from it; after all, I spent five years at the university attending Marxist lectures and seminars. I can play the role of a philologist, I studied to be a philologist, I could teach philology to young people, I more or less know that. Sometimes, out of foppishness, out of irritation and to get them to fall behind, I make it feel like I can do all this, and at the same time I do something similar. I can simultaneously tell the reader where it’s good and where it’s bad. I let him feel it... Once upon a time, Grigory Chukhrai , after reading my book about cinema, said: “It feels like you know very well where we are doing well and where we are doing poorly, but you don’t want to talk about it.” This means that it can be felt in my texts, despite the fact that I don’t say it directly. All this can be done along the way, this is professionalism, this is a craft, I studied it, I still own it. But this is not very interesting to me. I am interested in the spiritual state of another person and our co- existence with him, the event of our meeting and, accordingly, the cause of the cosmos, as Gorky said.

RJ: In one of the latest issues of “ Hunger ,” Alexander Ageev mentions you and Vladimir Turbin as representatives of that criticism that “competently used literature for its own purposes,” and further writes: “I will never forget the interview that Anninsky took in the late 70s from Yuri Trifonov: the writer immediately felt that he was being trampled into some kind of “concept”, and therefore was openly angry, but Anninsky easily neglected the evidence and pressed to the end.” Are you really going from yourself to the text, as, in fact, is befitting an essayist of the Rozanov tradition?

L.A.: Well, of course!

RJ: So the subject is more important to you than the object?

L.A.: No, if this is an event , then they have equal rights. When I see the text, I begin to empathize. Without text I don't worry. I can worry about something else, I worry, for example, that I was pushed into a tram, but when I read the text, this is an event . This is not me and not him, this is “what is together.”

As for Trifonov , maybe he was really angry because I refused to evaluate his works, but I didn’t notice his anger.

PS (Mikhail Edelshtein)

Advice to editors-in-chief: don’t bother, gentlemen, to break off young, self-confident journalists. It’s better to send them to interview Lev Aleksandrovich Anninsky. When they return, they will be like silk. When you prepare, re-read the texts, come up with your own questions and go with the firm intention of getting answers to them, and when you come home, you discover that you talked, it turns out, about what the interlocutor wanted to talk about, what seemed more interesting to him - it’s hard not to perceive it's like a practical lesson in humility.

Now I understand much better the feelings of Yuri Trifonov, described in one of the recent issues of “Hunger” by Alexander Ageev. It's not even anger, but rather discouragement. And Anninsky, of course, has nothing to do with it. That is, he is not to blame. He's just a monologue person. Therefore, almost all interviews with him that I found on the Internet and in various printed publications are an outright profanation of the genre.

And here, it seems to me, lies the key to Anninsky’s texts, to what is commonly called the critical method. Above, in the interview, he talks about the equality of subject and object in his texts, about their co- existence . This is, of course, not entirely true. The role of the object here is quite auxiliary. It should become a first impulse, cause a resonance in the critic, give rise to an associative series - and disappear, stop getting in the way. Then Anninsky himself begins - not so much an essay, but a meditation on a given topic.

Hence the thematic dispersion of Anninsky’s works, that same omnivorousness that makes some wince and others admire. In an interview, Anninsky says: “I can play the role of a philologist.” He can indeed play many roles, the range of which, at first glance, is amazing. But in essence, no reincarnation occurs: acting as a philologist, political scientist, sociologist, studying Nikolai Gubenko or Lithuanian photography, Anninsky in fact always plays the same role - himself. And what served as the initial impetus, Mikhail Lukonin or the adoption of the new old anthem - isn’t everything, in essence, the same?

Naturally, with this approach, not only the qualitative characteristics of the object lose their significance, but also its scale. Moreover, it is even convenient for a critic when the object is smaller than him. When he knows his place and knows how to crawl to the side in time. Too large names fill the entire volume of the text, leaving no room for the critic-essayist. That is why, in particular, the essays included in Anninsky’s relatively recent book on Russian poetry of the first decades of the 20th century, “ Silver and Mobile ,” are so impeccably bad.

Ageev very accurately notes that this manner comes from that era when the critic felt that he was obviously smarter than the overwhelming majority of the writers around him. What raises my doubts about that “Hunger” is rather the list of Anninsky’s “children.” The next generation of critics nevertheless moved away, albeit not unconditionally, from the genre of “self-portrait against a background”, making a choice in favor of literature.

And it’s understandable why Anninsky avoids talking about literature today. This, of course, is not the case with Daria Dontsova, although we were ordered from yesterday to consider her the main writer of the Russian land. And not at all in the current literary process. Whether this process is good or bad is irrelevant. The main thing is that it does not evoke a response in Anninsky. And why - God knows. Because with this approach there can be no objective reasons. And nothing can be explained. But the critic does not resonate with the material, and that’s it.

Today, genre guidelines have changed, and the essay tradition has also taken a step aside. If we talk about the genesis of a new generation of essayists, then Rozanov has nothing to do with it; it is rather a cross between Borges and gloss. One thing has remained unchanged: the essay is still a dangerous and cruel genre. For it requires not philological culture, but personal fulfillment. The essay, like that Pugachev eagle, feeds only on living blood. And no imitation is possible. Here you are either Shestov or nobody; either Chesterton or you don’t exist at all.

It is not Anninsky’s fault that “essay” has turned into a dirty word today, although he probably made his own contribution to this. He consolidated the view of the essay as something poorly structured and without a thesis. Is this not where his strange, at first glance, characterization of Blok as a person who “ walks AROUND” comes from, not wanting to walk DIRECTLY ? Isn't this a meta description?

I admit that the manner of Anninsky’s letter is quite alien to me. My sympathy and respect causes, rather, its current position. He is perhaps the only person in the country who still perceives the name of the publication in which he works. Well, imagine a correspondent of the Moscow Komsomolets or Komsomolskaya Pravda , informing the editor that he came to the newspaper in order to describe the news of the Communist Youth Union. And Anninsky works in the Friendship of Peoples and continues to write about Estonian novelists and Kyrgyz novelists. All others quit this to do this immediately after the legendary Georgian feasts and the houses of the vacationers of creative workers in the Riga seaside retreated to the field of legends. And Anninsky is still at the post. While Prokhanov is actively trading behind the niche in the post -Soviet literary space, the last soldier of the Anninsky empire continues to protect the empty Soviet mythologist, like Chonkin, his forgotten plane. However, he so sequentially withstands the role of the sixties of the battery that you begin to catch yourself thinking: is it not a game?

And in an interview, Anninsky, of course, is cunning. Whether he wants it or not, but he was, he was a critic number one. And it doesn’t matter if he perceived himself like that, the main thing is that others were seen (see, they will see him). And those who existed inside the same literary situation, and those who look at it from today, and those who will eventually write the objective history of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century. But today is the era of fulfillment of desires. Anninsky’s dream was also fulfilled: he finally became a marginal, a curved resident - “critic number zero”.

And the compilers of encyclopedias are wrong. Not Anninsky crushed with the process. And he lost his relevance either. This type of criticism has lost its relevance. Time changed the repertoire, and gained new actors to new roles. The current main critic resembles his predecessor much. The shepherd of his cows, he does not go too far from the text and never leaves the boundaries of the Lit Process. He guards his herd and every evening, carefully counting it over the heads, drives it into the barn. And it is right. The times of the Silver Age, when critics were engaged in painting excellent literature, only the characters of their works were called Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky - those times passed and do not need imitation or repetition. Criticism returned to its rightful place, and in these new old borders, Anninsky is closely and uncomfortable, as closely and uncomfortable to him in Russia, which ceased to be the Soviet Union.