Alexander Ageev. Hunger 2

Hunger 2
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: December 8, 2000

1. Underdigested Shishkin

I really didn’t want to talk about Booker here, in this column. But for the next two days after the sacramental dinner, such gnashing of teeth was heard in the press that I forgot about the unexpected joy (for once, a Russian novel appeared and did not miss Booker, who, according to the regulations of the prize, has been searching for it for ten years every day) and fell into severe bewilderment. Does anyone in this country still read books just like that, without integrating them into various premium plots? Does anyone read them to at least the second half? Or have critical stomachs completely relaxed from the excessive consumption of B. Akunin and other synthetic fast food released on the pop label “Zakharov” and are unable to digest real bloody meat?

Everything is clear with Nemzer and Arkhangelsky: the guys bet on another - faithful and familiar - horse. Well, we lost. Well, we pulled out the most unwanted ones from the six “obituaries” written in advance. And on the pages of “Izvestia” and “Vremya Novostey” suddenly such thick-dog Sovietism was poured out that even I, a recognized “liberal gendarme” (quote from Basinsky), opened my mouth.

In 2000, to blame a writer for his place of residence, to “sew” him a “passionate justification for emigration” and some kind of vague “spiritual capitulation” - fear God, gentlemen! I don’t see any barricades on the streets that you could perch on with your banners. Take your overcoat, go home...

Lisa Novikova! That's who I didn't expect from! Even if the title of your girlish, self-important article “They gave the booker without reading” was invented by an unknown rewriter, you cannot “read it in your hearts . ” Of course, the text sometimes helps the author “to overcome his intimate pain ,” as you write, and even I agree that the writer “starts a fuss” for this purpose . But with this conclusion your work as a critic should begin, not end...

Vadim Rudnev's control shot (it means the man was itching, since he returned the day after the inexperienced Liza to finish him off) simply upset me, like the negligence of a professional. Probably, in Russia now there are not even two cultures, as Rudnev believes, but five or six. The relationship between them is quite complex. But if one culture wants to establish itself on the corpse of another, and not otherwise, it means that it is sadly but irrevocably dependent on this corpse. The key word of Rudnev’s philippics is “vulgarity” (everything that is not Sorokin, not Pyatigorsky, not Rubinstein), but it seems to me that in the combinations “Rubinstein and “Itogi”,” “Rudnev and “Kommersant”” one can also hear something like that - not quite comme il faut. Although, of course, it’s most convenient to “shock the bourgeois” on the pages of “The Merchant”...

It's a shame, really. Some expected high quality, but not beyond the readability of the text. Others yearned for literature that was “more than literature.” And then something appeared where both were “in one bottle.” Did not recognize. Didn't digest it.

2. And other books

” someday However, while the critics were eating Booker’s free lunch with contempt (by the way, take a look at Sergei Yesin’s “ Diaries , where the author meticulously and tastefully lists the menu of many literary dinners), I was reading serious books.

First, a flimsy little book published two years ago by Progress and, as far as I know, not particularly noticed by anyone: Victor Klemperer. Witness to the end. From diaries 1933-1945 .

We noticed another book by Klemperer: “LTI (Language of the Third Empire)”, which made him famous. (The author of the review, Alexander Altunyan, is perhaps the only one who deals with political (not poetic) speech in our country.)

I remember when, between the fresh and plump volumes of the main enemy of “Westernism” A. Zinoviev, the torn spine of Klemperer’s modest book flashed, I was at first delighted, and then I was irritated by the pretentious (obviously not the author’s) title and the crafty word “from”. Oh, these “chosen people” that have now become fashionable! The diary is a notorious epic; it is unthinkable to “select” something from it without disturbing the living process. But our book publishing has by no means forgotten the cherished Soviet principle of “eat what they give you”: they translated Eine Auswahl fur junge Leser for you, so read it. Suddenly you'll look younger.

There are no words, the editors chose the most acute period: the life of a German Jew, the husband of an Aryan woman under the rule of Hitler. The mechanism of German pedantic, bureaucratic genocide. Slowly shrinking shagreen leather: step by step, circular by circular. Meanwhile, the professor continues to write his works about the French culture of the 18th century, keeps a diary, typeset the next chapters of the Curriculum vitae, and keeps a notebook, from which LTI will later grow.

The most amazing thing here is not the descriptions of Nazi oppression. The most amazing thing here is that the language of Klemperer’s diaries, in comparison with the rough, clumsy, pretentious, emotional, sports-youth language of the Third Empire, seems gray, cliched, middle-bourgeois. An elderly German professor against the national avant-garde: this is what a banal conflict turns into a tragedy here. The National Socialists actually tried to carry out an anti-bourgeois revolution in Germany, which had its shallow and deep roots. That is why there is an acute lack of records before 1933 and after 1945; there is no beginning or end.

And a strange, you know, thought comes to mind: in an extreme situation, the most conservative, the most fossilized, the most automatic part of the tradition helps to survive and preserve.

Which is probably true for both Dresden and Perm.

Vladimir Abashev , who had just been crowned with the Little Booker laurels as curator of the Yuryatin Foundation, defended, by the way, his doctoral dissertation a week before the crowning. I don’t know what the dissertation was called, but the “monograph” that the applicant must present to the academic council is called briefly and clearly: “Perm as a text . ”

Indeed, if St. Petersburg is a long-standing text, why not read Perm? Anyone who has overcome the dissertation conventions (substantiation of the topic, novelty, methodology, history of the issue, etc.) and reached the living text will be rewarded with unexpected discoveries, “bringing together distant concepts” and, in general, some madness of the entire project. Suffice it to say that the Perm plot of the first half of our century is developed by Abashev under the sign of Vasily Kamensky and Boris Pasternak, and the second - by Alexei Reshetov and Vitaly Calpidi. And Calpidi, by God, looks no more interesting than the Soviet semi-classic Reshetov.

Truly, as it is said in the conclusion, “Here Perm discovers and behaves as a person...” . And, of course, Abashev would not be Abashev, the founder and curator of Yuryatin, if he had not added: “Therefore, the proposed essay of the “Perm text” can be presented not only as a theoretical understanding of the problem and an interpretative model, but also as an introduction to the methodology of practical activity aimed at awakening the memory of the local text . "

3. Through the honest eyes of PROMT

But, frankly speaking, digesting a day according to the professor is a diet that requires some kind of unloading; so on an inopportune day I opened Itogi, which featured a group portrait of the Beatles on the cover, probably from 1964. The theme of the issue is “ Time of the Beetles ”. 20 years since the death of John Lennon, 30 years since the release of his last album. I read the cute, nostalgic articles by Alexander Kahn, decorated with elegant photographs, and thought - not only the residents of Liverpool want to remember the Beatles exclusively “pre-revolutionary” (before 1968), but we are also more comfortable with them there. Dear boys. Typical middle class. Almost a yuppie. Now we have it too. It even became somehow boring.

And I decided to remember the Beatles too: I put a disk with the complete works in Mp3 format into my computer and began listening, running from track to track. It’s somehow ridiculous to look at the monitor stupidly, so I usually have fun by immediately translating the attached English texts using PROMT, which is limited and honest, and therefore occasionally reveals the real truth of life. Today I translated Yer Blues. I paste directly from the buffer without interfering:

Yer Blues
(Lennon/McCartney) Yes, I'm lonely, I want to die
Yes, I'm lonely, wants to die
If I'm not already dead
Ooh girl you know the reason why. In the morning he wants to die
In the evening he wants to die
If I'm not already dead
Ooh girl you know the reason why. My mother had heaven
My father had land
But I have the universe
And you know what it costs
I'm lonely, wants to die
If I'm not already dead
Ooh girl you know the reason why. The eagle chooses my eye
A self-replicating virus it licks my bone
I feel so murderous
Just like G. Jones Dylan
Lonely wants to die
If I'm not already dead
Ooh girl you know the reason why. A black cloud crossed my mind
Blue fog around my soul
A feeling so deadly
Even hate my rock and roll
He wants to die, he wants to die
If I'm not already dead
Ooh girl you know the reason why.