Alexander Ageev. Hunger 29

Hunger 29
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: May 10, 2001

May 7th was my last working day at Znamya - cleaning, dismantling and paying off small debts. In the bustle, I somehow didn’t immediately notice that Olga Ermolaeva, the head of poetry (we were sitting, that is, now we were “sitting” door to door) - clearly not herself. Then someone said: they called from Yekaterinburg, the poet Boris Ryzhy hanged himself there.

Olga Yurievna loves her poets to the point of oblivion, and especially those like Ryzhiy. In April 1999, she made a selection in Znamya , with which her fame began, and then immediately - the promotional anti-Booker "Stranger", and the book "Love" in the "Pushkin Foundation", and all sorts of other things that now seem like vanity and nonsense.

Meanwhile, Ryzhey’s very first selection (which made me remember both Yesenin’s and Pavel-Vasiliev’s intonations and gestures) really smelt of death. From the fifth line, actually, death began:

But wherever I happen to cool off,
in sultry Paris, in dank London,
I advise you to bury my pathetic ashes
at the nameless Sverdlovsk cemetery.

And this clear leitmotif then sounded literally through the poem, and never ceased:

I want to tell you in advance
dear friend, one day I will die
on someone else's squashed sofa,
headache in the morning.

And we even went through the options:

I'll get the TT from the mezzanine,
I'll twist and turn -
I'll still live, etc.,
but for now I don’t want to
leave this light, this light,
this city and home.
It's good if you have a gun
the rest - later.

The “lyrical hero” in the space of the poem postponed his plans only because he wanted

It's not cool to say goodbye to yourself
so that - in tears, and not without.

Then I remembered - Olga Slavnikova said something so monstrous about Ryzhy and his company in one of her articles. I searched for a long time and found in #45 "UFO" an article with the luxurious title "Upper and lower landscapes of Yekaterinburg . " And there is such a “colorful” story:

“Four Ekaterinburg poets - Boris Ryzhiy, Oleg Dozmorov, Dmitry Ryabokon, Roman Tyagunov - announced a competition for the best poem about eternity. The winner will have a monument erected during his lifetime: in the project it is a marble stele in the form of an open book. The sponsor of the competition, as well as the manufacturer of the stele, is "Marble" association, which has been successfully operating in the market of cemetery monuments for twelve years and has corresponding aesthetic ideas about the eternal. Aesthetics were significantly influenced by the fact that atypical products with some additional artistic expressiveness are ordered from the association for specific clients. Usually, portraits of authoritative deceased have rings, earrings and crosses with a gymnast are covered with gold leaf. The lines of the winning masterpiece engraved on the stele will also be covered with the same material. The artifact is supposed to be installed on the territory of the Mramor company, near the bus station. There, in the vast courtyard of the association, where product samples are displayed, a place of honor has been allocated to the Writers' Walk of Fame. In the future, this Alley should be equal in pomp and splendor to the famous alleys of gangster glory in the cemeteries of Yekaterinburg.

Boris Ryzhy, the most famous and promoted of the four, realizing that he is unlikely to receive a “fee” for working on the jury in money, intends to take his due in kind. According to information from an unofficial source, the Mramor association agrees to make a high-quality tombstone for the poet Ryzhiy with his date of birth and an empty space after the gilded dash - so to speak, with an open visa to the “lower landscape”. The audacity of the poet, for whom death is just one of the reasons for creativity, was combined with purely Riphean audacity, which has a practical meaning. The monument doesn’t ask for anything to eat or drink, but Ryzhiy has everything planned out: “The words of the trans-Asian poet will acquire an all-European luster, I will forget the fabulous Sverdlovsk and the schoolyard in the Vtorchermet area. But wherever I happen to cool down, in sultry Paris, in dank London, I advise you to bury my pathetic ashes in the nameless Sverdlovsk cemetery. Not in terms of not devoid of beauty, but pretentious and artistic pose, but because my kents are there, their profiles made of marble and roses ... "And so on."

“So on” came quite quickly: first Roman Tyagunov fell out of the window (Slava Kuritsyn spoke about this in January ), and now the next call is Boris Ryzhiy. He was supposed to turn twenty-seven only in September.

His second selection in “Banner” was called “Mining Engineer” (which is what Red was by profession), and the third was “Bugler” (not the one with the bugle, but the one who drinks “from the throat”).

At night, a letter arrived from Dima Bavilsky: “ I saw the redhead at the beginning of March, he looked little like a person even then, such a lump from the mountain, drunk and aggressive, blurred like a Bacon painting, an eerie sight. There is some kind of monstrous pattern in this, although It seemed that maybe he would play at the damned poets, but grow up and come to his senses ."

I didn’t have time to grow up, I didn’t change my mind.

I write, I remember, I quote all this in an impotent rage: when this happens, I want to blame someone, call someone to account, punish. And who should be punished? Great Russian literature with its barbaric traditions? The Bolsheviks, who at the beginning of the century did not allow the “life creators” to finish playing their games until they were completely disgusted? The gloomy city of Yekaterinburg? The “Yeseninism” that Bukharin once suppressed? Drop an atomic bomb on the former closed city of Chelyabinsk-40, where Ryzhy was born?

In Russia throughout the 90s there was a sort of sweetish aroma of death - an easy, quick, accidental death. Publicists were fussing over the decline in the “value of human life,” but in general there was a sort of ambivalent celebration going on, a big all-Russian spree. What were they celebrating? Either complete “will”, or complete destruction, or both “will” and destruction at once. And such a specific energy was generated - “the will to perish.”

In literature, too, there was an ambiguous carnival, in the atmosphere of which talented young men quickly learned that literature is a game. Everyone played everything they could get their hands on. No one read the rules of this game - they were printed petite in an old thick, boring book, which the young men had no time to open: the history of culture once again began with them.

“ A monstrous pattern ,” writes Bavilsky, but also a banal one, reflected in culture a long time ago! A “cultural” artist knows: you cannot play creative games with death, you cannot treat it with a barbaric sense of equality!

Something went wrong - the second time about “barbaric”. This, however, is from Slavnikova - in the same article there is an extremely interesting observation, in our thoughts it is not superfluous: “ ... during the reign of Kolyada, as many as two such issues ("youth" issues of "Ural" - A.A. ) were published It is noticeable from them how strikingly different “that” youth is from “this one.” The former experimenters were refined modernists, who in the same underground breathed the common air with Nabokov and Platonov, preoccupied with style, cultural echoes and other high games of great literature. He was right about the new ones. the already mentioned Valery Iskhakov: “They write as if no one had ever studied literature before them.” The youth numbers turned out to be completely barbaric, but at the same time charged with some kind of brutal energy and obvious future expansion. Maybe in relation to this “Generation X “What Alexander Genis said will work: “Great literature is created by those who find themselves in a happy gap between the natural and the unnatural. Simply put, great books are written by “savages” for whom culture itself is still a sensational news-discovery.” I note that one of the young prose writers, the author of a large published story and several unpublished ones, curiously twisted the plot around several figurative axes at once (not vice versa, as this happens in a traditional realistic text), he busily asked me who Makanin and Bitov were, and wrote down their names on a separate piece of paper." .

“Great literature” from the “savages” doesn’t inspire me much, I must admit. “Brutal energy” and “expansion”, about which Slavnikova wrote almost with hope (in any case, with anticipatory interest), are supported here by a clearly neurasthenic, hysterical “pumping”, which is fraught with characteristic breakdowns - and not only voices, but also unfortunately.

...Red has a short poem where he, so to speak, defines himself among his “predecessors.” It defines itself in a very unique way:

Up to the navel I spoiled manners,
the friars climbed off the bunks,
on the back Joseph Brodsky
screwed up at the bump.
The showdown begins
for understanding, for tattoos.
I tear apart the greasy collar:
Don't bother my soul.
Slutsky's profile is pinned up
on a graying chest.

It is clear that Brodsky was by no means the poetic “patron” (“authority”) of Boris Ryzhy. But it’s not Slutsky either.

What kind of strange whim was it - to find oneself between two stoics (and cynics), who spent their entire lives freezing out of themselves that barbaric “dampness” (“dampness”, of course, we will not soften) that finally strangled Red?

In a word, I want to wrap up something long and obscene, prohibited in Russian Journal - I didn’t want to return from vacation with an obituary.

But here’s something worse than swearing for you - from Boris the Red, may he rest in peace:

So I didn’t turn out to be a poet,
and it will never come out again.
Gentlemen, what do you say to this?
The gentlemen drink and cry in silence.
They drink and cry, they hug girls,
they drink again and still remain silent,
shake their head tonically,
they shout obscenities syllabically.

P.S.
Judging by the calls and letters, few people read the previous “Hunger”. He is here . And second: now we will fast on Mondays and Thursdays. From now on, I am a quit-rent person, not a corvée person, and therefore I solemnly promise not to miss my service days.