Dmitry Bykov. Bykov-quickly: look-34

Bykov-quickly: look-34
Dmitry Bykov

Publication date: April 12, 2002

Gentlemen hexogens

To be honest, I thought of avoiding this topic - and I still think that the transformation of "Mr. Hexogen" into a literary event (and, perhaps, into a national bestseller) is not due to the literary significance of this opus and not due to the social weight of the designated problems for them, but because of the usual literary lack of fish. Only in the absence of fish are long debates about Boris Akunin possible, and only in the absence of political life is a scandal surrounding the appearance of Prokhanov’s novel in the Ad Marginem publishing house possible. The funny thing is that nothing fundamentally new has happened - and it’s even strange that Dmitry Olshansky, whom I quite like, has only now matured into the article “How I became a Black Hundred member” ( “Bookplate” ). It’s just a shame that, having ceased to be a liberal, he immediately became a Black Hundred member - as if “we have no other alternative,” as the still unforgettable Gorbachev explained to the people.

has always published Ad Marginem not very good prose, no miracle happened here. Vladimir Sorokin accurately called him has always been a socialist realist with an inhuman face, as Nikita Eliseev , but socialist realism with a human face does not exist. The artistic value of Prokhanov’s novel, which is a concept in its purest form, is approximately identical to the artistic value of the story “The First Subbotnik” - with the only difference that Sorokin destroys the socialist realist style (some idiot would write - deconstructs the discourse) with the help of obscene vocabulary and other openly parodic instruments, that is, he does it not without humor - and Prokhanov allows for mystics, which is why socialist realism is again deconstructed, like Lenin in the Mausoleum and on the cover, but without a shadow of irony. Roughly speaking, Sorokin is fun to read, but Prokhanov is funny. Sorokin helps get rid of some imperial complexes, clearly demonstrating the boredom and mediocrity of empires - Prokhanov does the same even more earnestly, but is not aware of his task; so the publishing house of Alexander Ivanov continues its conceptualist policy, nothing more. Both Sorokin's novels and Prokhanov's novels cannot be considered as literary texts themselves: their beauty lies in their consistency. This is how you look at a disgusting insect, which I already wrote about in relation to the newspaper “Zavtra” and “Novaya”, which has long surpassed it in terms of uncleanliness of methods. Disgusting, but whole - therefore, aesthetically pleasing.

I’ll say more: the fact that “the esthete and the barbarian are forever at the same time” was noted long ago by both Mann and Matveeva. “After all, drinking wine from a lady’s shoe and slurping cabbage soup with a bast shoe are the same thing.” There has been no secret that fashionable (stylish) youth are flirting with ideological extremes since the late sixties - and it is not surprising that this fashion has reached us. Even in Sorokin’s “Marina’s Thirtieth Love,” the only one who managed to satisfy the dissident esthete turned out to be a factory party member, and Sorokin’s novel ended in the strong embrace of totalitarian aesthetics. The fact that in the poetry of Alina Vitukhnovskaya the aestheticization of cocaine is combined with the aestheticization of fascism is a natural and logical thing: “We are brilliant poets, we are conquerors of whores, we smoke evil cigarettes among people who are strangers to us. We are brilliant poets, we will not wait for anyone - we Let’s buy evil pistols and brazenly kill.” "Win" would be more accurate in terms of rhyme, but weaker in terms of meaning. In my opinion, these are good poems (the only poems by Vitukhnovskaya that I remember by heart). The immoralism of the so-called fashionable (stylish) culture, its modest sadomasochism - all this fits perfectly with the immoralism and somewhat more brutal sadomasochism of our soil culture; Dugin’s mysticism is also immoral (for mysticism always removes moral responsibility from a person), and, say, Shchedrovitsky’s methodology. And in general, our liberals are very close to our own party bosses - if only because, like the ambassador’s son Vic. Erofeev, came out of their midst. Bad people always come to an agreement. Their phraseology has long been approximately the same: the communists claim that several hundred thousand people died under Stalin, but this is the cost of the method - and one of our liberal publicists, whose name I have not mentioned for a long time at his tearful request (from him this is why bile spills every time), I recently wrote in a well-known business magazine that in the nineties there were, of course, some costs... several tens of thousands lost their jobs and homes... the outskirts were smoldering... but then there was liberalism! In my opinion, this phraseological similarity, this unity of discourse, excuse the expression, speaks more eloquently than any other comparisons that “the Jew and the Chukchi embraced, lightning soared above them.”

Here we need to make a small digression about the reasons for the crisis of domestic liberalism: the fact is that there was no liberalism. Pavlovsky recently called me and said: junior sergeant Bykov, why won’t you respond to Boris Berezovsky’s manifesto? Well, I’ll respond to such nonsense, Comrade Colonel General, I answer with an innocent look. What does it mean - nonsense, Colonel General Pavlovsky does not understand, what does it mean - nonsense, when it is printed in black and white?! Come on, there’s a lot all around, and by the evening I’ll have a quiz about this anti-communist money-fest. So what to do? Bosses! After all, I sold my soul to him, and now there’s nowhere to go. I ran to read the manifesto. I think the old man has gone completely crazy (I’m talking about Pavlovsky): why is he asking me to write criticism? What the hell kind of liberalism is this and what kind of manifesto? Abramych has become completely impoverished if people cannot write him a decent text. After all, this is a joke for the chickens: Russia has always been a country of extremes, and therefore now it is simply obliged to become extremely liberal. How does he not understand that the very idea of ​​extremes is organically hostile to liberalism? How was it not explained to him that Russian liberalism of the nineties, when Berezovsky, in fact, ascended, was outright arbitrariness, and not at all the kingdom of freedom, and that extreme liberalism, in Russian speaking, is precisely lawlessness? Should I not know, did I not understand during these years that any local king or his satrap could throw a journalist under arrest, initiate a case against him, hit him on the head, and what was happening in the provinces is incomprehensible to the mind! We didn’t have any liberalism in the nineties, but there was the apotheosis of permissiveness with the complete impotence of the state, and a more shameful time has not been observed in Russian history of the second half of the century! If Abramych doesn’t see this, God will judge him, he’s completely reached it in his London; but why doesn’t Olegich see this? He spat and did not write about the manifesto.

This is probably what my creative position looks like in the minds of some forum representatives; I’m not a proud person, I go to forums willingly and really like to wave my fists there. Shall I tell you, dear conspiracy theorists, who are counting exactly how many pieces of silver I sold my immortal soul to Pavlovsky for, what exactly I did with you and which of your openings that introduce you to the world suffered the most from this? Well, Brodsky also has quotes that have become proverbial; alas, these are his most vulgar lines - about the holes that introduce him to the world, and about thieves, who are somehow better for him than bloodsuckers.

But enough about all sorts of fools (I mean, of course, Berezovsky and Pavlovsky, and not you, dear readers). Let us agree that there was no sign of liberalism in the era of price liberalization, if only because none of us felt freer at that time. There was, of course, a layer of 0.05 percent thickness who worked as PR people and marketing managers during the day and hung out in clubs at night; but even this layer in 1998 seemed to understand everything. Liberalism, by definition, should make a person happier and his existence more comfortable, because it is based on traditional, old European humanism, which places man at the center of the universe. Liberalism is a comfortable existence under the shadow of the law. Only Boris Berezovsky, who speculated in oil and cars, and Vladimir Gusinsky, who speculated in freedom of speech, were comfortable in Russia in the nineties. Berezovsky was prettier to me because he didn’t dress in white. But for the majority of the Russian population, including those who, by their very social status, seem to be the very electoral base of liberals, liberalism did not bring the slightest happiness: firstly, they had to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, with results disproportionately modest, and secondly, talent and humanity not only did not serve as a guarantee of prosperity, but directly excluded this prosperity. It was necessary to have a set of very destructive properties plus complete dishonesty in order to accumulate any decent capital in Russia in the nineties; At the same time, it was necessary to close our eyes to everything that was happening in the country. The journalists, whose duty it was to expose all this chaos, closed their eyes very willingly - because they bought into freedom of speech; a kind of social contract was concluded - you ignore the fluff on our stigmas, and we give you the full freedom and we hold you for this freedom like eggs, which I have already written about many times. As a result, a zombified country that adored the “Vzglyad” program and equated statehood with pogroms, for ten years in a row chose not freedom , but arbitrariness and lawlessness, plus rampant disinformation.

And now, after ten years of all this bacchanalia, some of our smart youth have seen the light and began to choose the greater of two evils - because the lesser turned out to be too great.

But here we must remember that we never had Soviet power, but rather a greatly simplified monarchism. The empire could only be saved at the cost of radical simplifications, increasingly harsh - and the overcomplicated Russian political life was consistently and radically reduced in 1917, 1937, 1957... Lenin went crazy with fear, planning a grandiose liberation, and instead organizing no less grandiose enslavement: this great cynic did not even imagine that history would use him much more cynically than he used it. Lenin was succeeded by Stalin, who had even fewer moral restrictions. Stalin was replaced by Khrushchev, who was an order of magnitude more stupid than him. But this was not the limit of stupidity - Brezhnev and his followers came; Gorbachev and Yeltsin did not rule at all, having launched the mechanism of total collapse and becoming its victims. Throughout the twentieth century, Russian statehood has steadily degraded - and in this sense, it has long been impossible to talk about the Great Empire: those who lived in it remember. I once asked Novella Matveeva how she felt about Soviet power. “I haven’t seen her,” the greatest of the singing women answered honestly. “Who consulted anyone here?!”

So, the conflict between domestic liberals and pochvenniks is in fact a conflict between the left and right hands, which have finally recognized each other. The opposition between Russian Slavophilism and Russian Westernism was removed long before Prokhanov published in Ivanov: when the sides are equalized, you very quickly cease to distinguish between them. Both are fictitious: we had neither a powerful mystical Soviet empire, nor a prosperous liberal country, nor a real dictatorship, nor genuine humanism. First we were tired of one fiction, now we are tired of another - that’s the whole difference; but we are as far from authenticity today as we were in April 1985.

also spoke about the collapse of humanism Blok , the author of the great phrase “I am an artist, and therefore not a liberal,” . The aforementioned liberal publicist, in his good, in my opinion, review of my novel “Justification”, has already suggested that my ideal is not Rozanov or Florensky, but precisely that of Blok’s “man-artist”. While the second novel has not been published and not even fully completed, I have to object here: Florensky is close to me (Rozanov to a lesser extent), he was the first in the new century to clearly articulate the incompatibility of the Old and New Testaments, imperial and humanistic consciousness, but Blok’s man -I actively don’t like the artist. I really love Blok the poet and deeply respect Blok the man, but like any author who studied Blok a lot and seriously, I understand that he was a hopelessly ill person, including mentally. Rejoicing in death and decay, denying the vulgarity of everyday life - these are precisely the traits of a marginal, degrading, degenerating consciousness, such as Blok’s consciousness, burdened with terrible heredity. Actually, he died from the same disappointment as Lenin (the intelligent and deep Etkind in vain attributes syphilis to both of them): he had earlier seen the face of the coming centuries, which he called so much. Yes, I am also an artist and also not a liberal, but if as an artist I cannot be a liberal (deny the vertical scale of values, renounce the literary struggle, recognize everything as equal to everything, etc.), then as a person and, if you like, a citizen, I I was and remain the same liberal who suddenly stopped liking Olshansky so much. I can understand Olshansky: he is tired of horizontal consciousness, equality, theft and other nonsense. But why did they turn to Prokhanov as a result of his sympathy? Here’s what I can’t understand: why is it necessary to choose between a noose and a noose, and not, say, between liberalism a la Berezovsky and at least conservatism a la Kipling? I'm not talking about Chesterton - he is a complex writer.

So, where a horse goes with its hoof, there comes a crayfish with a claw, as V. Vozdvizhensky liked to say when giving a lecture to students about the gospel chapters of Aitmatov’s novel “The Scaffold.” After Blok’s “The Collapse of Humanism,” Anton Seregin spoke about the crisis of humanism, writing an entire article on this slippery topic in last year’s “New World.” A discussion club was immediately opened. I wrote then (and do not renounce this today) that Berezin naively - and perhaps quite deliberately - confused humanism with humanity, that is, under the pretext of fighting anthropocentrism, vulgarity, laxity, etc., he began to revive rotten ideas of the Wagnerian type (already Nietzsche understood their doom and therefore criticized humanism from a much less barbaric position). Roughly speaking, after the liberalism of the nineties, smart boys (Seregin is 25, Olshansky a little more) wanted greater passions. They seem to seriously believe that if these great passions triumph, they will continue to go to the OGI club and discuss the latest in current literature with Lev Pirogov. Moreover, Lev Pirogov (with whom I usually do not argue, since he himself does not believe a single word he says) recently asked the question: was this what people died for in ninety-one?

Well, you look very good to the dead... But, of course, you didn’t die for Akunin’s prose. And the fact that a liberal has no a priori right over a patriot was noticed much earlier than you (in particular, I wrote the very first quickle on this extremely fresh topic). The only trouble is that the patriot has long since had nothing to offer: of course, Akunin has no energy, and Prokhanov has it in abundance, but his prose remains, first of all, very mediocre, not withstanding the slightest criticism. And therefore, as you please, I refuse to see in it an alternative to liberal chatter or liberal physiological sketches of our thin Volos. Slavnikova, let's say, is a liberal, and Pavlov is a conservative, but it is impossible to read both, even though both have overflowing pride. Please understand that this dichotomy has been overcome, this opposition has been removed - and there is no one to choose from for a long time!

However, not only Pirogov and Olshansky, but also Nemtsov and Zyuganov do not want to understand this. There is persistent talk that the left and right are ready to unite in criticism of the current regime. Really, sometimes you feel like the current regime - because both the left and the right can’t stand me in the same way, and if only they knew how mutual this is! The fact is that there are no left or right for a long time - there are those same thieves and bloodsuckers that Brodsky suggested choosing between, but he, fortunately, did not have time to make sure that thieves are just as not disdainful of bloodsucking as bloodsuckers do not disdain theft!

The key to all past and future Russian mistakes lies precisely in the fact that it mistakes theft for liberalism, and equates statism with blood drinking. Well, if our freedom is the prose of all the Erofeevs, and our totalitarianism is the prose of Prokhanov and the criticism of Bondarenko, then there is really nothing to choose from. Just don’t say that in the nineties, liberalism in Russia once again got crap.

It was not he who shit himself, but she.

I am an artist - and therefore not a liberal.

But I am a man - and therefore, I will not go to hug any Black Hundred member, no matter how much his thieving opponents pester me.