Alexander Ageev. Hunger 48

Hunger 48
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: August 20, 2001

For the last few years I haven’t liked leaving Moscow, even for a short time. You leave it, changeable, for two or three days, and then it’s scary to look through the mail: some professional trouble will certainly happen during your absence. Either a favorite publication is suddenly going to die for the next world, or somewhere in a good place there will be a bad “rotation of personnel”, which until now, Comrade Stalin is right, decide a lot. Otherwise, suddenly someone nice will come calling, or vice versa - someone nasty will praise you. But you never know what can happen.

In a word, when I returned from my short travels, I didn’t immediately turn on the computer, and even then I crossed myself: I love news, but not all kinds. Besides, it’s apparently August, a month in which God doesn’t like Russia. After that, I think, he doesn’t like how ten years ago he gave her a big and undeserved gift in August, which she misused.

But today I am personally lucky. I got into my mail, somehow scattered a mountain of spam and learned with great relief that the Russian Journal and the “Magazine Hall” had finally come to an agreement, and the “hall”, which had been in a stupor for two months, was expelled from “Russia-on-line” (here who are full of fools), reopened - now on RJ. I can imagine what doubts about the advisability of such a step were overcome by the high-ranking contracting parties: this is not a takeover or a merger, or even a confederation, but some kind of outlandish free association, but I am terribly glad that the matter was done. Now all that remains for Russian Journal is to come to an agreement with the Moshkov Library, and it will be possible to write a cart to the Antimonopoly Committee: all other literary resources of the Internet, in comparison with such a monster, will find themselves in the position of a rural boiler room next to the entire power of RAO UES.

Jokes aside, however, a truly important cultural matter was organized, a rare case when pathos is appropriate in my writings. We can all be congratulated, and I really hope that both RJ and the Magazine Hall will increase significantly in number of readers.

Well, right away, naturally, I went into the freshly posted issues of the magazines and leafed through what I had time. Even with some vague purpose.

Here recently Bavilsky, in his column “Critical Realism,” somehow very sadly lamented first that analytical criticism had disappeared (for some reason from daily and weekly publications, where, to tell the truth, no one needs it for nothing), and then and the complete disappearance of prose from thick magazines (which is both true and untrue, but more on that later). And he writes these sorrowful words from Baville:

“ I looked around, and my soul became wounded: there was not a single good, deep, analytical article in my near and far. With a detailed and leisurely analysis, with extensive quotes and non-trivial conclusions. You read and look, but everything somehow passes by Well, you know, I’m used to reading magazines from the back, and newspapers from the cultural pages. So what?

When a colleague is killed like this (and I know that Bavilsky is sincere both as a person and as a critic), I really want to somehow console him - they say, everything is not so bad, and we still have cool analysts who are prone to " a detailed and leisurely analysis with extensive quotations ." In newspapers, it is true, they persecute such people (and rightly so, between us, they do), but in magazines they are still found. So I climbed into the nearest accessible “Ural” and immediately came across a very detailed article by Mark Lipovetsky about Brodsky - it’s called “The Criterion of Emptiness” . And heroically read it. Everything here is as Bavilsky would like - every conclusion is confirmed by a whole bunch of quotes, the idea develops “ in detail and leisurely ,” the author appeals not to the momentary premium vanity that Bavilsky was so disgusted with, but almost to eternity, and his conclusions, if not quite “ are non-trivial " (it seemed to me personally that I always intuitively knew all this about Brodsky, which Lipovetsky proves, and therefore was absolutely sure that one of the "Brodskov scholars" had long ago verbalized my intuitions - and it’s not a pity), then certainly quite good quality.

But here’s the thing: while reading this article, I (I’m ashamed to admit) dozed off for a couple of minutes. And I had a dream from the time of my university, assistant professor youth.

Well, imagine: the summer session, the heat, stuffiness and bustle, I have about seven graduate students, I have to write a detailed “supervisor’s review” about each diploma, and even my colleagues, who also have diplomas, threw me five papers - and about them, too, you need to write lengthy “opponent” reviews. And here I am sitting in the middle of the night, reading one of these other people’s dissertations and getting terribly angry, as often happened to me in my last university years.

Why am I angry? And therefore: the boy (girl) is smart, he has mastered literary technology, he knows the material, he has read sources and manuals, he has found the best typist in the city (back then they still printed diplomas on typewriters) - exemplary, in a word, work, and it should be given an "excellent" and almost not somewhere to recommend.

But I feel sick: I see that the smart boy is in complete confidence and joy that he has “mastered the method”, and this joy will obscure all other meanings of his work, and tomorrow he will go through the procedures he has learned with the same appetite (precisely the procedures, alas, not the "method") of any other writer. But still, I give the smart boy an A, although I do not recommend his work for publication, thereby offending my colleague, his supervisor.

Such a prophetic dream over Lipovetsky, and then all sorts of thoughts about a self-sufficient “bead game”, which easily becomes a passion and quickly devours all the literature available to the player.

God forbid - I’m not talking about not needing to analyze texts. I mean that the rituals, procedures and ceremonies of analysis themselves are extremely “radioactive”, you become infected with them, and at some stage it may become absolutely no matter who you dissect - Blok or someMogutin , Brodsky or Alina Vitukhnovskaya . And in every critic who has gone through the academic school, it must be said, there is this smart graduate student who has mastered the “procedures”, and sometimes you have to watch yourself so as not to give him free rein. I read an article by Lipovetsky - as a rule, an intelligent and lively critic - and I felt extremely sorry for Brodsky, although Lipovetsky said some interesting things about him.

No, criticism and literary criticism are definitely two different professions. I smothered the literary critic within myself for ten years, and it was a kind of internal stylistic and philosophical drama. I had to observe several similar dramas from the outside. Some were resolved successfully to the mutual satisfaction of the author and the public (the case of Andrei Nemzer ), others smolder and from time to time give unexpected outbursts.

By the way, if you open the July issue of Friendship of Peoples , you can find a product of the transition process there: Elena Ivanitskaya is trying to analyze a certain novel.

Let’s say right away that her situation is difficult. Firstly, in criticism it is not so long ago, it came to it from academic literary criticism and brought, by the way, extremely high criteria and, accordingly, a certain skeptical feeling towards all modern literature in general. I am afraid that she still does not see the entire panorama of this very modern literature, but distinguishes only individual names and phenomena (taken out of context and out of her own history). Moreover, which ones he distinguishes is more likely to be chosen by fate, and not by the high literary taste of the critic.

And now a famous poet, with whom Ivanitskaya has repeatedly demonstrated her good personal relationship in print and for all of whose collections she has invariably published enthusiastic reviews, suddenly publishes a novel. As if even “with direction”, with “ideas”.

Naturally, Ivanitskaya cannot help but write a review of him - the inertia of the relationship is too great. If she had been a completely and completely critic, the review would have turned out to be a “positive” one, no matter what Ivanitskaya actually thought about the novel. A “positive review”, even if only for Ananyev, is not a Newton binomial.

But the devil pulled her to remember the analytical “procedures” and pass through them the novel of her favorite poet!

High (including ethical and philosophical) criteria turned out to be tightly connected with the “procedures” that the critic once worked on the literature of mature Russian modernism. The crudely concocted novel of the popular poet and publicist could not pass through these “narrow gates,” and did not pass.

The text of this review is a real drama unfolding before the eyes of an astonished reader. In it, the stubborn will to praise (this is from the critic) struggles with the decisive impossibility of doing so (the unrepressed literary critic rebels). The result was an amazing “human document”, which I would recommend that Vl. Novikov, who teaches “on critics” at Moscow State University, examine with his students.

That is, I want to say, this thing is strange: “analysis of a literary work.” On the one hand, if you abuse it, you can lose all literary conscience. On the other hand, sometimes analysis can replace this very conscience...

There are, however, other options. When the eighth issue of “The Banner” is hung in the new “Magazine Hall”, I will certainly say a few words about the lengthy article about Kibirov by Evgeny Ermolin published there. This, as they say, is something...