Alexander Ageev. Famine: December 5, 2000

Famine: December 5, 2000
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: December 5, 2000

1. From opus to epic (Explanatory memoir)

It’s already been two years since I quite successfully returned from the other world. I won’t hide it: this event immediately filled me with a certain organic complacency, in the organic sense that it was the body that rejoiced and became vain, having outplayed not only death itself, but also me, the main rapist over it. However, on the very first gloomy hospital morning, I discovered that the most important rituals had fallen out of life - and life, if you don’t think too hard, can be considered a complex chain of interconnected rituals, which is why, naturally, their entire system, which had been developing for decades, fell apart.

Thank God, there was no strength to be sad, or to rebel, or to come up with a new “project”. All that remained was to relax and wait (not without curiosity, however) where the uncontrolled organic matter would move. And I won’t lie - at first I wanted to smoke. But then immediately - “something to read.” Since they were treating me with the help of absolute hunger, the much more natural “chew something” was turned out, replaced and firmly established...

As they say, “we had with us”: August 1998 issues of “thick” magazines, a plump stack of manuscripts from which it was necessary to compile the next issue of the “Znamensky” “Observer”, and for some reason the second volume of “Joseph and his brothers” - for easy re-reading, it should be.

But in another life, “thick” magazines decidedly “didn’t work” (it’s only a pity “The Old Girl” by Vladimir Sharov), the “new newspaper” typeface of the publishing house “Pravda” almost quarreled with his beloved T.M., and the manuscripts were shamelessly and fearlessly concocted some half-decent bullshit . And then there was a month of frankly physiological (for, let me remind you, you couldn’t drink or eat) reading according to a randomly formed, but then ferociously observed system: Marinina’s novel - Dean Koontz’s novel - Sidney Sheldon’s novel (and so on until the market was completely exhausted). I don’t remember either the word or the name (therefore, the product was completely dietary), however, from this random systematicity, the third strongest reflex of the new life developed: the fight against entropy. The passion for establishing and maintaining order must have been connected somewhere on a subconscious level with the opposition to disease: what is disease if not a special case of entropy?

The fourth call to life turned out to be the awakening of the private property instinct: if we are to be , then it means to have . On weak legs, I hobbled to the first floor of the hospital, where some trade was happening, and bought a book, of course. It was “Prince Florizel” by R.L. Stevenson, published by Izvestia in 1993, the pre-reform 100,000th circulation of which provided a ridiculous price - 9 rubles. About five years before that, I had not bought books at all: at home the five-thousand-strong docent library weighed on my consciousness and space, and at work books were given, brought, sent every single day. This quickly corrupts the healthy humanitarian instinct of book acquisitiveness. And so he returned - as good as new, right up to the night dreams: I’ll leave the hospital and immediately go to the Biblio-Globus...

But - winter after default, debts, an arrogant decision to do only what I want and know how to do - read and write accordingly. Where is the money, Zin? After three or four attempts, the old literary hack started up, in which I have been running for the last two years, so as not to be too interested in the prices of books, magazines and provider services.

This is how a stingy but working life scheme has been built: I read, buy, write and try to put things in order in what I have read, acquired and written. This is my current, self-generated organic matter, worthy of trust. All other rituals are conventions that I just observe, as befits a well-mannered person.

And the idea for the column was born from the clear realization that only 10 percent of what is read is reflected in writing (that is, put in order and appropriated-digested). Such a low efficiency, as I realized after some thought, is associated with the inability to abandon the venerable “opus” principle. The principle is simple and must exist not only in my head: I can really appropriate any complete and integral text (“opus”) only by responding to it with my own “opus.” Extremely expensive. I would like to look for some resource-saving technology. At least in school physics. Remember the strange nature of light - is it either a wave or a stream of quantum particles? So, looking back on almost any of my “reading days,” I increasingly think that it is easier to describe it as a “wave” “epic” than as a discrete series of “opuses.” And where can you move from a limited opus to a dimensionless epic more easily than on the Internet?

2. Stumbling is good for centipedes

Natural organic processes, no matter what they say about centipedes, can and should be rationalized. Organic matter is untidy, meaningless and self-sufficient, it is heading towards heat death until you ask it the simplest questions that trigger the mechanism of processing nature into culture.

"What are you reading?"

This is a relict, politically incorrect question; these days it is asked only by journalists serving the departmental book trade press, and to the most defenseless people: politicians, businessmen, show business stars, venerable writers. They all stumble in the same place and re-read the Russian classics together.

Alas, I have almost no time to reread Russian classics, because I read:

- from five to ten daily newspapers with all their supplements;
- all decent weeklies with or without covers;
- at least ten monthly literary and semi-literary magazines;
- 20-25 books of different quality and genre out of at least a hundred that pass through my hands per month;
- 10-15 Runet sites (that is, of course, updates);
- many manuscripts that are also about books.

In addition, having won the Soros competition and received a grant, within a year (!) I must compile a bibliographic reference book on Russian literary periodicals for the last 15 years (1985-1999). These are 1800 issues of thick magazines, honestly written de visu according to the immortal principle “he is about him.” At least five issues a day, no time to read, but what a panorama, what headlines! Now I’m finishing up “Young Guard” (have you heard of such a publication, oh free sons of the online?) and with genuine excitement I’m following the creative path of the beautiful and fierce stranger Alisa Rusakova, which in the headlines looks like this:

Alisa Rusakova

• It makes no sense for Russians to work not for themselves. - MG, 1993, # 8.
• Soviet Union or Russia? - MG, 1993, # 11/12.
• On the status of Russians in Russia. - MG, 1994, # 3.
• Constitution of the enslavement of the Russian people. - MG, 1994, # 4.
• The wreckage of Russia will become the prey of world capital (The destructive meaning of “human rights”). - MG, 1994, # 5/6.
• Russians and the Eurasian Union. (It is very important for the world behind the scenes to install non-Russian power in Moscow). - MG, 1994, # 9.
• Two civilizations. - MG, 1994, # 12.
• The main nation of Russia and how it is exploited. - MG, 1995, # 2.
• Russians need national restructuring. - MG, 1995, # 5.
• The ideology of Russian destruction. - MG, 1995, # 12.
• Human rights are not for Russians. - MG, 1996, # 1.
• CSD - the concept of destroying Russia, or Whose turn is it to extract resources in space? - MG, 1996, # 2.
• Minority and majority. - MG, 1996, # 8.
• Slavic question. On the scientific and cosmopolitan tastes of the Varangian intelligentsia. - MG, 1996, # 10.
• Democrats are starting to commissarize (Or how the “New Worlders” are looking for fascists all over the world). - MG, 1996, # 12.
• Avant-garde, underground and personality development. - MG, 1997, # 1.
• Who did Yuri Andropov serve? - MG, 1997, # 2.
• Where do the paths of civilization lead... - MG, 1997, # 6.
• The mystery of the Russian idea. - MG, 1998, # 1.
• No peace, no war. - MG, 1998, # 8.
• "Human Rights" for Russia... - MG, 1998, # 10.
• Are there thresholds for degeneration? - MG, 1999, # 2.

A worthy path! And who will say that bibliography is a boring business? On the other hand, it acts as an aperitif, and since the day begins and ends with it, after reading everything described above (described above than Alice's bibliography), I am constantly hungry and irritable. And the hungriest days are weekends.

3. Weekend in hunger

For these unstructured, entropic days, I leave the weekly magazines that I automatically buy on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. This time, “Itogi”, “Money”, “Vlast”, “Expert”, “Afisha”, “LG” and “Obshchaya Gazeta” survived until the weekend “uncut”. Someone lost the "Vek", and on the "Novaya" the wife peeled potatoes and threw them down the garbage chute along with the peelings. Well, okay - I don’t like “Novaya” and I won’t go online for it.

Buying “Literature” is a reflex too old to be rationalized. But reading it causes me (who keeps its first 16-page issue from 1967, it seems, like a relic) phantom pains in different places and severe heartburn. Either they will tell you that Dostoevsky is a youth writer, then a rather plump man will pretend to be Tanya Savicheva and tell, according to the St. Petersburg tradition, how “everyone died” ( “Not only Ivan Petrovich died (and not only Borges), thick-magazine prose died, aka “ Vagriusovskaya", and "Our Brand" drives the nail into annual sets and eclectic book series. The Booker-anti-Booker flickering of authors and works that are not in demand by anyone except a critic friend has died. Books published with the support of the city (in St. Petersburg) administration have died. or the Open Society Institute ). All you can do is look at the smart, but completely irresponsible Pirogov, who is talking about God knows what : “If earlier the theme of creativity was the internal or external world, and the text, willy-nilly, performing the notorious “cognitive function”, acquired at the same time social significance, then today’s masterpieces like “The Taking of Ishmael” tell only about themselves. writing emerges from the void (in the place of which there used to be an internal or external world) . " Dear Leo! I was in this novel (in its last chapters) personally , because I was once friends with the writer’s older brother (who ended up in prison) and was in that apartment on Chekhov Street, saw my mother, her roommate, and the then young Misha Shishkin , crammed languages. I was in tears when I finished reading “ The Taking of Ishmael ,” and I was tormented by fear - I wouldn’t meet myself among the episodic characters, everything there is so archaic and real. I learned the end of a story I was present at the beginning of. And you worked according to the rules: “writing arises from emptiness”, “masterpieces tell only about themselves”...

“Power” (# 47) pleased me with two outstanding materials: 1) Oksana Khmara sent Sergei Sergeevich Averintsev to the next world. Talking about the exhibition of ancient Russian icon painting at the Tretyakov Gallery, she cheerfully said: “A catalog, one of the articles of which was written by the late Sergei Averintsev, will help you understand all these subtleties” ; 2) Grigory Revzin wrote a really good article about how the “machine house” (the Narkomfin house), a monument of Russian constructivism, is dying.

Oksana will probably be fined, and maybe even expelled. It’s a pity for the girl, although it’s a good sign for Averintsev.

...Mysterious magazine "Itogi". For four months I have been writing the Nota bene column in Vremya MN, for four months I have been trying to catch Itogi with at least one article that is prone to dialogue, that is, requiring reflection... Despite the fact that in Itogi there has been permanent hysteria since June and as if they “cry” - the surface remains smooth and there is no contact. This is some kind of special skill, the secret of which I have not yet figured out. However, in this issue, somehow sideways (alien to the whole context, with alien callouts) there is a truly “appealing” article by Tanya Voltskaya about the history department of St. Petersburg University, living in an atmosphere like something like 1949. Why - we have a free country!

...At one time, Lev Danilkin said, arrogantly speaking about the principles on which the “literary policy” of Playboy magazine is based: “We will never publish Klech . ” But I love Klech, and therefore every time I open the “Afisha” (all sorts of paper tickets, prospectuses, coupons fall out of it), I note with vindictive sadistic pleasure how lonely Danilkin’s book corner looks against the backdrop of the local celebration of life. “I go to see women, but not for that,” Chatsky once said proudly. So I look into “Afisha” to read specialized products there: articles and reviews of Yuri Saprykin’s CD. The young man’s favorite word: ” “uncompromising . Rock, rap, and funk - everything is “uncompromising” with him. Which is invigorating.

From “Afisha” to “Obshchaya Gazeta” you move as if in a time machine. These articles would not have had a price in the memorable year of 1978...

But why the hell do I stubbornly buy “Money”? The long-term effect of the most talented advertising campaign in Russia (“Where is the money?” - remember?). And one more incident: I once wanted to buy a magazine called Leisure. And it (in a smaller format) lay exactly on the “Money” magazine. I hand over the bill and point my finger, and the seller, naturally, asks: “So do you want “Leisure” or “Money”?” Tough choice, huh? Since then I’ve been buying “Money” and no leisure time...

In a word, over the weekend I got hungry, which is why on Monday I started reading three books at once: the diaries of Victor Klemperer (in the subway), “Perm as a text” by Vladimir Abashev and an absolutely fascinating book with pictures by Hasan Huseynov “The Map of Our Motherland: Ideology between Word and Body” , published for some reason in Helsinki (at work and at home).

About them - in the next issue, which, due to the lack of need for a preamble, will be much shorter.