Alexander Ageev. Hunger 78

Hunger 78
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: June 6, 2003

So , about criticism.

All my adult life I have been hesitating: should criticism serve literature (well, some radicals believe - the reader, because literature itself seems to be intended for him), or at some stage in the development of literature does it at least partially emancipate from the environment that gave birth to it?

Even reading Belinsky’s articles, I sometimes thought: isn’t this better literature than Dal (Lugovoy), Marlinsky or Grigorovich, not to mention some Kvitko-Osnovyanenko? Belinsky patiently explained to all of them what had come from their pen, charged everyone with his own temperament (unless Thaddeus Bulgarin had such a powerful one in that era), gave everyone thoughts (and not always, contrary to established prejudice, he was enthusiastically assimilated but poorly digested Hegel).

Reading the writers of the Silver Age, it was already difficult to doubt: there was a distinct process of turning criticism into prose, and I, who once selflessly loved the poems of Innokenty Annensky, now prefer “Books of Reflections” to them. Blok’s three volumes of lyric poetry, alas, are half dead, meanwhile his critical prose, which his contemporaries treated with semi-contempt (and even today’s literary critics are not very fond of it), still retains some kind of naive “drive”, and reading it, after some with exceptions, it is quite possible.

Khodasevich’s poetry and criticism are at least worthy of each other, but I absolutely don’t remember Georgy Adamovich’s poems (although I once copied a couple of his collections by hand, in our “pre-Gutenberg era”). I don’t remember because they were overshadowed by criticism and the magnificent, still lively “Comments”.

In the 20s - 40s, criticism turned out to be “senior” to literature “by position” in the aesthetic hierarchy that then emerged, and its only super task, it seems, was the task of finally strangling literature. There are also talented people among the executioners, but they still prefer to work “in their main profession.”

The real problems (“problems” in this case are not synonymous with “troubles”) began in the late 50s, when people who had practically nothing to talk about with the bulk of their contemporary writers came into criticism - these people both owned a pen and thought much better. Is it any wonder that at the same time they retained the sense of “seniority” over literature characteristic of the previous era? They were decidedly uninterested in execution, but using literature competently for their own purposes was of the utmost importance.

Even two names are enough to indicate a trend - Vladimir Turbin and Lev Anninsky. I will never forget the interview that Anninsky conducted in the late 70s with Yuri Trifonov: the writer immediately felt that he was being trampled into some kind of “concept”, and therefore was openly angry, but Anninsky easily ignored the evidence and pressed to the end.

From Turbin and Anninsky (I deliberately omit the “New World” criticism of the 60s here, because it somehow became outdated amazingly quickly) into the 70s came a larger generation of critics who felt internally even freer in their relations with literature. Almost all of them are in good health - these are St. Rassadin, and B. Sarnov, and S. Chuprinin, and Vl. Novikov, and A. Latynina. I don’t name the rest of this generation, not because I want to offend, the lists are just boring.

To the widespread formula “criticism is the self-awareness of literature,” Sergei Chuprinin answered sharpest and most definitely with his book from the late 80s: “Criticism is critics.” And for the time being, I personally liked all this - well, in any case, it did not cause any fundamental protest.

And I stopped liking it exactly when I myself became something of a critic (and, in general, followed in the footsteps of the same Chuprinin), but literature - remember, who else can, the beginning of the 90s - catastrophically quickly lost social status and prestige. The trick is that criticism lost it to a much lesser extent, but rushed to the rescue of literature somewhat sluggishly.

On the contrary, she never missed an opportunity to mock with pleasure, endlessly varying Belin’s “we have no literature.” From this generation, it seems that only Vladimir Novikov, who always lacks “leftism” and radicalism in literature, still stands in this position, and Alla Latynina with her defeatist “Twilight of Literature”, which gave rise to an internally empty and surprisingly sluggish in even in a purely stylistic sense, the discussion in Literature.

I don’t know if there is any specific “literary god” who can have mercy and punish, but many seventies critics in the 90s were, in my opinion, punished - they almost stopped writing (at least about modern literature), giving the field to newspaper reviewers.

We, who came in the mid-to-late 80s, were also punished. We critics - I mean Andrei Malgin (who still managed to get into the mentioned book by Chuprinin), Evgeniy Shklovsky, Alexander Arkhangelsky, Andrei Nemzer, Andrei Vasilevsky, Vladimir Potapov and some others - were, in general, not so bad (professional analysis of the text at least they knew how to do it). But the virus (let’s call it the “virus of equality” with literature) also circulated in our blood. Only Nemzer turned out to be immune, but in the early 90s he too suddenly fell into such dense “artistry”, into such self-sufficient writing that sometimes the understandable text was not visible behind all this.

Well, where are we all now, except Nemzer? Malgin - I don’t even know where he went; Shklovsky is a prose writer who writes more and more interestingly from year to year; Arkhangelsky is a big shot at Izvestia, and now also on television, and is more occupied with establishing a “civil society” in Russia than with literary novelties; Andrey Vasilevsky is the editor-in-chief, this is a very special profession. And I, too, spent almost the entire 90s more occupied with “life” than with literature, and anyone who thinks that “Hunger” is a “return” to criticism is sorely mistaken.

In a word, we were practically taken out of the literary field, and it was occupied, as they say, by “every creature in pairs.” A similar classification was given in Sergei Chuprinin’s recent article “ Citizens, listen to me... ”, so I will not compete with him.

People of different talents and qualities - from the very gifted Kuzminsky, Danilkin and Bavilsky to the mediocre Basinsky, Olshansky and Pirogov - worked with literature as their darlings pleased: some enthusiastically invented and theoretically substantiated new “isms”, others “defended traditions,” some were concerned about grafting the “wild” mass culture onto the decrepit trunk of “thick-magazine” literature, others openly went to the service of the growing book publishing business.

At first, this whole carnival did not seem fun: the chaos was annoying, and it was then, probably, that I suddenly felt a taste for the “traditionalism” that Mikhail Edelshtein recently accused me of. By the way, the energy of irritation often fueled “Hunger” and my other texts on literary topics of recent times. Evgeny Ermolin in a recent (and rather superficial) article “ Critic on the Network ” even defined me this way:

Ageev is brave and smart on the Internet. But at the same time he is a zoil, a misanthrope and a fastidious person. He was difficult to please. Ageev was unpleasantly struck by everything. Even for some reason, “a completely shameless PR campaign to maintain the interest of the enlightened public in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter products” - “moronic chewing gum.” No more, no less. And you’ll never know what he might like. Ageev knew how to be sarcastic, he knew how to casually insult and pass by opponents thrown to the ground.

Thank you for “ brave and smart ,” of course, but we can argue about “ misanthrope .” However, what is true is true - I gave various reasons for such a perception.

But here’s a miracle: I read the recently mentioned article by Chuprinin, which, in my opinion, was written in too mournful tones (and before that I read his article about the “ zero years ”), returned after a long absence from RJ - and experienced - you won’t believe it - a distinct feeling of complacency .

Take RJ: several discussions, among them the one about criticism, in which I am now pretending to participate. And the passions seem to be serious: Anna Kuznetsova, who is very smart but has an excessive reverence for literature, clashes with Mikhail Edelshtein, who believes that criticism has spoiled literature by lowering its evaluation criteria; and then Vladimir Gubailovsky intervenes in the dispute, responsibly declaring:

Criticism cannot set itself the task of objective selection and objective (that is, independent of who expressed this assessment) evaluation of a work, because criticism in a fairly general case does not have the tools to solve this task. And if a critic puts it before himself, he will have only one thing left to do: disgustedly turn away from modern literature - where everything is unclear, not thought out, not evaluated, not softened and not detailed by a historical perspective, where according to the classical canons nothing exists. Turn away, declaring everything unworthy of mention, or arbitrarily declare 4-5 writers genuine, and all the rest imaginary values. Why 4-5 and not 20-30? Because there can never be too many good writers.

Then Nikolai Alexandrov again talks about the shortage of quality literature.

Well, and so on. But I want to say: “And you, Abram, are right, and you, Sarah, are not to blame.” I like that everyone here was raised in different fields, trained in different schools, and so often disagrees with each other.

And I don’t want some kind of Cosmos to be born out of this chaos (it seems to me that I’ve already been to the critical “Cosmos” once). The current chaos seems to me to be quite balanced and, therefore, viable. I want to argue with many people (and I want to get pleasure from it), but I “fight back” only when a certain character charged with ancient energies suddenly emerges from the chthonic depths of literature and tries to bend the literary space with his weight.

As, for example, Solzhenitsyn did this, publishing in the last issue of Novy Mir another opus from the Literary Collection series - this time about David Samoilov.

Maybe I’ll say a few words about this in the next “Hunger”.