Alexander Ageev. Hunger 67

Hunger 67
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: February 4, 2002

In the 90s, writers - prose writers, poets and critics - flocked to work in the popular press, mainly in daily newspapers and weeklies. It turned out that in the era of freedom of speech, only there a person with a pen can earn his bread and butter without retraining as a house manager or small merchant.

The transformation of a writer (and a critic, if not by the nature of his talent, then by his sense of self, is still also a writer) into a journalist was accompanied by certain moral costs and some loss of status: the last thing that interested the owners and readers of the “new” press was culture, and already in culture - elegant literature. That is, in addition to the usual newspaper bustle, haste and coercion, a writer who hired himself as a journalist had to endure the consciousness of his second-class status in comparison with political and economic commentators, crime chroniclers and sports commentators. Not to mention the fact that the writer found himself in a specific, not very highly cultural environment, and this environment was not always ready to respect the “writer”.

And therefore, among colleagues who did not go into popular journalism for one reason or another (or did not get into it because there were few vacancies), an ambivalent, condescending and compassionate attitude was established towards the “defectors”: on the one hand, a person is weak, but “you always want to eat” , so why not, let him earn his long dollars. On the other hand, who doesn’t know that a newspaper for true talent, if not death, is in any case lack of freedom: let’s say you want to write an enthusiastic review of Olga Sedakova ’s book , which was published in 1000 copies, and the editor frowns and says : “I don’t know who Sedakova is, and our general reader doesn’t know! But my wife says that the best writer of our time is Daria Dontsova . Why don’t we write about Daria Dontsova?”

In the early 90s, such conflicts were perceived acutely, and not every gentle writer’s soul could withstand it all - there was a series of “breaks” and departures, there was a constant migration from publication to publication in search of a “good gentleman,” that is, an intelligent editor.

By the end of the decade, everything had more or less settled down, the writers had time to mourn the former high status of fine literature, and came to terms with their inferiority and place in the penultimate - before sports - band. Little by little, a certain number of “newspaper writers” lined up - full-time reviewers, columnists, feuilletonists, whom no one could think of to feel sorry for: morals became harsher and more cynical, and about the fact that something about literature can be printed and read not only in the newspaper, the majority conveniently forgot.

Alexander Arkhangelsky (and all of the above, phrase by phrase, somehow wrote itself out to me as an approach to a conversation about his book “ Political Correction ,” which collected newspaper articles from 1998-2001) came to Izvestia just at the end of the decade, in 1998, and this fact did not surprise anyone: well, another talented critic has “attached” himself to a good “feeding trough”, they will now shout around with Nemzer across the square - Nemzer’s review of recent magazines, and Arkhangelsky’s review, Nemzer’s anniversary article about Solzhenitsyn - and Arkhangelsky there too.

Arkhangelsky actually wrote about Solzhenitsyn - this article opens a book just published by Modest Kolerov under the label "Three Squares" - but then he behaved as if he was not a critic at all: he did not notice new products, did not write reviews, was more involved in television, than literature, and then he began to write frank journalism, not in the back of the newspaper, but closer and closer to the front page. So it’s not far from the editorials! - some part of the literary community became alarmed and began to preemptively despise Arkhangelsky. After all, a critic in a daily newspaper is “our man” in the media jungle, caring, as much as he is allowed, about common literary interests, but the author of political editorials is clearly “not our man”, who has chosen a completely different career.

And we must also remember that the end of 98 - the first half of 99 was a time of extreme contempt for politics among the reading intelligentsia. This apolitical period began back in 1993, after the shooting of the parliament, then the Chechen war and the elections of ’96 further intensified the aversion to politics, and the default in August ’98 plunged the educated class into a state of complete cynicism. Then even some very intelligent people publicly proclaimed anathema to the entire era of liberal reforms, many suddenly turned very pink, and the majority fell, I would say, into a specific hedonism on the edge of the abyss: everything is collapsing, they say, well, to hell with it, that means no You need to “hold your back” more, but, on the contrary, you need to relax and give yourself pleasure in every way. Then, by the way, the star rose high, first of Marinina , and then of Akunin . Arkhangelsky painted an expressive picture of the mood of that time in the article “Right, left, where is the side?”:

“ The intelligentsia (to a much greater extent than the “ordinary” people) “swayed to the left, swung to the right.” Nowadays, don’t feed the freedom-loving intellectual of the late Soviet model bread, let me talk about the fact that not everything was bad under Soviet rule: they made great movies, ballet was better than the current one, book publishing was funded, you could go to work at an academic institute twice a week, and then at home, in your office, think about lofty things. The main thing was that you had the right to rule minds without being responsible for anything "(July 29, 1999) .

And against this background, an intelligent and ambitious person, a talented critic, suddenly changed his profession, turned into a liberal newspaper publicist, that is, he began to write what no one needed for nothing.

The easiest way would be to attribute purely career motives to him (Arkhangelsky is an energetic, power-hungry man, and he really made a quick career at Izvestia), but in those months it would have been easier to make a career by voicing slightly different ideas. And then, what is a career inside the current editorial offices? Tomorrow the owner changes or the boss steals - that’s the end of his career. Reputation is much more important, and Arkhangelsky, suddenly taking on a business that was then considered by the majority to be both dirty and unpromising, risked his reputation.

So, a career is a career, and having now re-read Arkhangelsky’s articles from those times in a book, I think that he was really worried about what few people were worried about then - the moral and ideological vacuum left in Russia by the “intellectuals of the late Soviet model” who had left the stage, complete helplessness authorities in this sensitive area and what he calls “postmodern glass bead games” (against the backdrop of a tragically unfolding story). I remember well my own feeling in those months: very unpleasant. It’s as if the country has suddenly become stupid and completely given up on its future.

We can say that Arkhangelsky threw himself into this black hole with his chest (you feel how difficult it is to say such things, you have to “lubricate” them a little with an ironic “image”) in order to fill the gaping void with direct journalistic words. He had to take the most unflattering pose, put his words into monstrously pathetic, tasteless bouquets, well, at least something like this:

" The dissidents, in alliance with the progressive apparatchiks, fulfilled their mission - they destroyed the previous regime; the first wave of businessmen, together with the cynical Komsomol members, also coped with the task - no matter what, and there is a market in Russia. But now another problem has arisen in full force, with which neither dissidents, neither businessmen, nor even businesswomen will be able to cope. Namely: to answer the question why Russia plunged into the largest civilizational shift, how does it see itself? In other words, on what value foundation will its state body be built? On what ideas will it be built? raise our children - simple enough for everyone to understand, and complex enough to meet the realities of the global world ?

From an abstract aesthetic point of view, this is terrible: primitive rhetoric with howls, remembrance of “ our children ,” the meaningless question “ how does she see herself? ”, and all this in a compositional “frame” that inevitably seems false - as if the Swiss friend Georges Niva sent a fax with bewildered questions about what was happening in Russia, and Arkhangelsky (also by fax) answered him sublimely (even if all this was true, the effect of “directing” still arises).

I don’t think that Arkhangelsky himself did not understand how such frontal journalism was read by indifferent outsider eyes. And if he understood, it means he neglected and turned over the heads of the indifferent to someone else, still capable of reacting to simple pathos. Or maybe he hoped to revive half-dead journalistic genres by forcing his voice. In this impulse, really, there was something desperately heroic and even, I’m not afraid to say, avant-garde. After all, in the 90s, a specific speech etiquette developed: most of the “serious” and “significant” things, including politics, ideology, history, were prescribed by this etiquette to be spoken exclusively with irony. By the end of the decade, this practice was already so established that not only Arkhangelsky wanted to blow it up.

By the way, the fact that he himself is fluent in irony and knows a lot about it is clear from the second section of the book, “ Roll of Honor: Political Images of the Yeltsin Era .” These short portraits - from Chubais and Yavlinsky to Korzhakov and Lebed - are for the most part very witty, precise and subtle. The experience of a literary scholar and critic was clearly useful to Arkhangelsky here: if a person is able to write an explanatory book called “Pushkin’s Heroes,” then why shouldn’t he classify the heroes of the modern political scene and build an expressive gallery from their portraits? They are really no more complicated.

But, although literary “Roll of Honor” looks more elegant than anything else, I read the chronicle sections with much greater interest - as life unfolded, so the publicist reacted to it. Pathetic pyrotechnics and didactics, which are inevitable in such cases, absolutely did not prevent me from restoring in my memory the outline of nearby history, which, unfortunately, is quickly forgotten. It was a happy idea to collect these articles in a book - we throw away newspapers, and real historians will not deal with our days for a very long time. And here, after all, is an important segment of our life, comprehended by an intelligent person without delay. You can agree with him, you can disagree, but he has already done a useful and necessary job - the ugly mess of everyday life is structured, marked out, explained.

This kind of literature is practically not published here. If anything like this comes to mind, it’s perhaps Maxim Sokolov’s monumental two-volume book “Russians’ Poetic Views on History ,” which was published three years ago. We have no taste at all for political literature - not for dull “political science”, busy developing the same plot about the behind-the-scenes struggle of Kremlin clans, but specifically for political literature, where politics is understood as part of the national culture and is analyzed in the context of the general cultural development of the country. And the lack of need for this kind of reading is evidence of the infantilism of our “educated community.” It somehow extremely quickly agreed with the sly slogan that “we don’t have politics.” Our policy is what we deserve. If life interests us less than a movie or a fashionable novel, then sooner or later we lose orientation in it, and soon we are filled with disgust for it.

But I will return to Arkhangelsky, to the transformation of a critic into a publicist. I would even say that Arkhangelsky did not just change his literary role (in principle, a literary critic with a certain taste for social issues can easily move, when he wants, to direct, rather than text-mediated, journalism - well, that’s how I do it, when I write to "Profile" ). He seems to want to take part in the re-creation of our reality with his words. That is, he writes not in the genre of “I can’t remain silent” or “this is what I think about Berezovsky ,” but more and more often in the genre of “what to do.” Your attitude to this depends on how you experience passing time. There are times when “what to do” sounds unbearably vulgar, and there are times when it makes no sense to say otherwise.

What are the times now? Well I do not know. Must be transitional. The title of the book - "Political Correction" - irritates me (somehow I'm not ready to trust anyone with the right to correct my political views), and some of the texts are very nice. In general, I am in every possible way for smart writers to enter the newspaper from the front door, and not huddle in its outskirts.