Alexander Ageev. Hunger 80

Hunger 80
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: July 10, 2003

Well , here it is: “after a severe and prolonged” cold, for some reason I did not die, but recovered, and I can say a few words about the reading that accompanied that cold.

Reading during illness is a specific thing: illness is one of the options for freedom, a moment of falling out of the circle of ordinary circumstances and obligations, an old teenage joy - you don’t have to go to school! It’s the same with reading: you can put aside something that is scheduled for obligatory “working” and become capricious, grasping at one thing or another. The main thing is that all sorts of literary conventions, conventions and abstractions immediately fly out of your head, the mind stops building rows and engaging in primitive comparative studies: texts suddenly turn out to be incomparable and, while reading, occupy the entire space of the half-asleep consciousness.

Actually, even in health, I try to live (and read) in the same way, but the pressure of the outside world cannot be avoided: it imposes circumstances and obligations that I have to fulfill, at least to a minimum extent.

The first thing I grabbed for some reason was Maigul Axelsson’s novel “ The Witch of April ,” which had long been warmly recommended to me by at least five intelligent women . Well, I took it and read it. While I was reading, I felt so pleasantly swayed - a solid epic with minimal mystical inclusions. After reading, I realized that “women’s prose” still exists, and it’s better for me to stay away from it: somehow we don’t match in internal rhythms. Well, is it really bad?:

“However, love does not need any rational arguments. Christina simply loved “Post-Industrial Paradise” in spite of all reasons. Left at home alone, she sometimes caught herself doing strange things: she would either press her cheek to the window, or stroke the wall, or stand up and stand moving in the corner of the living room for twenty minutes straight and just watching the dusk fall, dressing the faded colors like angel's down. Once she pinched her fingers while trying to hug the door. That evening, when Eric returned home, she was tormented with such guilt as if she had spent the whole day with her lover, and the blue spots on her fingers seemed to reveal her, like others - traces of hickeys on her neck. And Eric felt it. While applying the bandage, he squeezed her sore fingers too tightly

".

By the end of this plump novel, I felt somewhat impatient, and immediately took up the long-delayed first issue of Novy Mir , where “ Pitomnik ” (“big book of stories”) by Evgeniy Shklovsky was published.

Shklovsky the prose writer is practically ignored by critics, and this, in general, is not a mystery: it is difficult to believe that a fellow critic is capable of growing into a real, non-philological writer in ten years. Shklovsky “sprouted,” or perhaps this should be expressed more energetically: “made a breakthrough,” and found himself in a creative field that no one else cultivates except him.

His stories are read slowly: after each text you simply physically need a break - not so much to “understand” what you read, but simply because of the extreme concentration of this prose. Like a pill: swallowed in one fell swoop, and then it dissolves for a long time before the mysterious chemistry of the interaction of substances begins to work. Shklovsky’s best stories unfold for a long time in the mind, what is read enters into complex connections with one’s own experience, is accepted or rejected, in a word, it gives rise to some kind of intense process. It doesn’t “grab” (since it’s not fiction), but it “hurts”, “gets stuck” in the head, and you have to painfully get rid of some images so as not to interfere with normal mental life.

About twenty years ago, Vladimir Makanin puzzled the Soviet reading public with a number of stories that seemed to “mark” the established and established social reality. The human types and situations created in the stories “Otdushina”, “ Klyucharyov and Alimushkin ”, “The Man of the Retinue”, “The Fleeing Citizen” and some others were instantly “recognized” and a discussion, unproductive at that time, developed around them, and the author received punishment for cool detachment, for research dispassion, unusual for the Soviet reader, fed from a romantic nipple. And Makanin, while pursuing his anthropology, came dangerously close to very “adult” (almost unbearably scary) thoughts about man for the Soviet consciousness of that time, and therefore he seemed to “hold his breath,” sparing himself and the reader.

Since then, a lot of water has passed under the bridge, the social landscape has changed radically, literature has suffered from all childhood illnesses and senile ailments, and absolutely no one wanted to do what Makanin began then - the study of variants of the human norm . The cataclysms brought to the surface so much extreme non-normativeness that the literary mainstream rushed into that spacious channel promising non-lethal adventures.

Evgeny Shklovsky remained with the norm - both with the norm of writing, based on good psychological realism, and with the norm of human life flowing peacefully, despite all the cataclysms. He equipped his private laboratory, on the outskirts of the main road, with new optics, stronger than those of his predecessors, and discovered what had long been known, but somehow forgotten due to many things: “the electron is as inexhaustible as the atom.” He discovered that a “normal” person - not a murderer, not a schizophrenic, not a drug addict, not a moron, not a homeless person - is a threshold creature who maintains the appearance of stability through incredible daily, hourly efforts. In reality, these efforts are automated; in Shklovsky’s prose, the mechanisms are given “in cross-section,” as on a stand, and this makes you feel uneasy at times.

The prose writer takes, for example, the simplest everyday situation: “I’m leaving,” she says and stops at the door, as if expecting something. Now it’s my turn to ask: where? Or: when will she return?" (I take an old story from the book "That Country", the story "Parting"). From this small seed grows a powerful bush of psychological problems, a whole drama of seemingly normal human relationships: "I ask, but she doesn’t answers. Or - I don’t ask, but simply say casually: for now... If I say so and don’t ask anything, then this is already a violation of the ritual, immediately complicating our already difficult (there is no such thing as simple) relationship. They are complicated by the fact that they seem to hint at their simplicity and commonness . "

This is, in essence, every situation in “normal” life; a person always walks through a minefield, forced every second to choose where to step in order to maintain that balance of freedom and dependence on another, which does not threaten either the “norm” or the “self.”

prose Reading Shklovsky’s , you often recall Sartre’s “hell is others,” but even more often his prose reminds us that a person carries his hell within himself. The “normal” world is extremely dangerous, near and far are charged with conscious or unconscious aggression, life is cold and scary, it is impossible to avoid a collision. Feeling this, a person builds psychological “barricades,” unwittingly becoming saturated with aggression and sometimes losing the idea of ​​“the limits of necessary defense.” Shklovsky writes all such situations, increasing and increasing the scale, since his main task, it seems, is to understand where the transition point is, where the norm turns into pathology.

It is extremely difficult, using such strong optics, to refrain from the temptation of various “final” conclusions, not to fall into the demonization of the passions and complexes that overwhelm a person, and not to take the position of an indifferent observer. Shklovsky avoids these temptations by choosing an intonation of benevolent (not complacent) surprise. Therefore, his stories do not overwhelm with the concentration of problems, do not devastate, but puzzle, even awaken some new interest in life, since they offer new tools for its knowledge and unexpectedly formulate some “eternal” questions about it.

In "Nursery" it is difficult for me to single out any one "representative" story: a very even, very competent selection. “Education According to Dr. Speert” is very strong, but “Vestnik” is no worse, and “Bakhtin, Erzya and others.” And an absolutely delightful version of the “ménage de trois” - the story “Three of Three”:

" No matter how bitter it is to realize that something irreparable, wonderful, sad, delightful, alarming, mysterious, wondrous is happening, it is happening. And everyone understands this and cannot change anything. And no one thinks about the future. Nadya has some kind of... then there is a special shine and a crimson ringing in his voice (“It’s time to get an injection”), he has a quiet mournful tenderness in his face, but at the same time determination (“Bring something?”), and two wet dark stripes on his pale skin, a closed gaze and an effort of thought directed towards him (them)...

There are three of them, united in opposition-consent (two plus one).

The three of them ."

Well, in a word, there is no point in quoting this centripetal prose; you have to read it. Honestly, I now know only one other storyteller of this level - Asar Eppel : a completely different texture, pathos, language, but the drive is of the same level.

Well, okay: enough about the serious stuff. Here I recently came to work, and on my table there was a package with the logo of the Eksmo publishing house . The bag contains a plastic box with a handle on which is written: “Tatiana Ustinova’s first aid kit.” Further letters add up to an almost threatening message: “It is used as prescribed by the Eksmo publishing house in cases of exacerbation of weakness in reading: with emotional arousal, memory loss, indigestion, insomnia, decreased sexual desire. First aid kit contents: Ustinova’s bestseller, medications and protective agents for side effects."

I open the drawer and see: a book by the above-mentioned Ustinova “The Queen’s First Rule”, a Sico condom, a bottle of valerian, a tube of “troxevasin”, a plate of validol tablets, sulgin and a bottle of ammonia. The instructions for using all these drugs are printed inside the box. Well, for example, why would I need a condom? Here's why: "a means of protection against sex amnesia. Use as a bookmark when reading in bed with your loved one. (Don't forget to unfold it before use!)"

Well, I appreciated the joke, valerian, validol and troxevasin will be useful to my mother (thanks to Tatyana Ustinova), I am delighted with the advancement of the PR people of the Eksmo publishing house, but I told you: I have a bad relationship with “women’s prose” in almost any its version. That is, I will not read The Queen's First Rule. diary I’d rather read Vladimir Lakshin’s “The Last Act”, published in three the last issues of “Friendship of Peoples”.