Alexander Ageev. Hunger 45

Hunger 45
Practical gastroenterology reading

Alexander Ageev

Publication date: August 2, 2001

Somewhere at the beginning of the year , Natalya Ivanova , reviewing Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel “Kys”, wrote, having probably been infected by Tolstoy’s exaggerated epic style:

" And what a book! My gods, what a publication! The paper is a newspaper waste. The cover is cardboard, the kind that was used for school textbooks in Soviet times. The cardboard is painted with black paint. The one that quickly peels off is wiped off. And since the design of the book was done by Art. Lebedev, Tolstoy is not a stranger, then all this is not the whim of the publisher... In general, the moral: nothing should, according to the plan, distract from the text. And Tolstaya herself - on the last page of the cardboard cover in the tiny window of a serial photograph from the impenetrable blackness of the reader looks out ".

But for some reason I didn’t buy this book then, when everyone was buying it and feverishly reading it - and in general I don’t like hype, and the book is really not a masterpiece of printing art. I read it, as they say, from the wrong hands, felt deceived in my expectations, and from the many reviews of “Kys” I agreed with Nemzerov’s .

But then the other day I went to Biblio-Globus and saw: bah! Three books by Tatyana Tolstaya stand in a neat row in the serial design set by “Kys”: “Kys” - “Night” - “Day”. And the paper is by no means a newspaper waste, but a very decent offset one. “Day” is naturally white (cream-colored to a light green), “Night” is green for some reason, and “Kys” is what it was, and remains the same - “ cardboard painted with black paint .” Well, I was seduced by such laconicism of the plan, bought this small (and almost complete) collection of works and even re-read it, starting with “The Day,” which had the subtitle “Personal” and which included a variety of journalism, collected for the first time in a book.

"The Day" opens with almost Tolstoy's most recent work - the essay "Square", which was talked about a lot and Bavilsky quickly responded to its newspaper publication in "Vremya MN" .

He reproached Dima Tolstoy: she herself, they say, uses “pm-strategies”, that’s the only reason she became famous, and she occupies large areas for her celebrity in the newspapers, and then suddenly she came across “contemporary art”, ungrateful. Bavilsky writes:

“ I myself ( he is generally a lyricist, so he often uses himself as an example - A.A. ), perhaps, am not delighted with the frigid purity of the centers of modern art; I personally prefer proven modernist art, deep, metaphysical. “Nevertheless, I cannot deny the laws of existence of modern forms of creativity, if only because I myself play, forced, on this field. For lack of anything else .”

Then I thought: what kind of baby talk, where does this lack of freedom come from? So to speak, “Bavilsky endured and ordered us.” And who ordered Bavilsky to endure it, who commanded him to “ build galleries of empty canons all the time ”? Well, obviously - Slavoj Žižek, from whose banalities Bavilsky abundantly quotes, and Slavoj Žižek - Lacan, etc. And “this field” itself, on which, poor Bavilsky, is forced to play, pretending that there is no other field - what kind of cowardly submission? “This field” in Russia exists thanks to the efforts of two dozen specific people, and it is a pure fiction, a space that we simply physically have nothing to fill - well, there is not a sufficient number of high-quality products of “modern forms of creativity” for “this field” to be taken seriously . Another thing is that outside “this field” neither Bavilsky nor those two dozen theorists and practitioners of “pm-strategies” simply exist.

But Tolstaya is.

With his own extra-theoretical, but very strong “Ndra” and “non-Ndra” - and a talent sufficient for me, while reading “Square”, to submit to the charm of this talent. So that, while I read, I feel hatred for Malevich, “Black Square” and all the tedious epigonism of the current “current culture” (I only feel disgust towards the latter). It is then that questions and objections may arise, but while you are in Tolstoy’s text, you share her feelings. That’s why, by the way, you share that they exist - heavy, even frenzied sometimes, but genuine, not reducible to “strategies”, “tactics” and other “positioning”, and cannot be deduced from them.

In a word, I read Tolstoy’s “The Day” with true pleasure: magnificent, evil, killer journalistic prose; flexible, precise, economical language; a convincing image of the author - a large, headstrong woman who does not represent anyone or anyone. Gestures - including linguistic ones - are sharp, and behind them, sorry for the banality, real human strength is felt. Where did Bavilsky get the idea of ​​“ one-sided repressive pedagogy ”? To say loudly and freely, without looking at the “reference groups”, one’s “ndra” and “not a ndra” - is this really “pedagogy”? And only the weak see alien power as “repressive.”

In connection with Bavilsky’s reaction, I recall the beginning of Natalya Ivanova’s review of “Kys”, where the critic draws something like a portrait of the writer, or rather, reproduces the image of Tolstoy, which must have been stuck in many heads:

" He doesn’t go to parties. The eyes are large, black, shiny. The mouth is large, there are many teeth, the voice is loud, the hair is powerful. After all, you can’t feel sorry for someone like that. You can only step aside to free up space. But we have few places, and no one can free up anything wants ".

Ivanova wrote her review in order to somehow balance out the scathing review of “Kysi” at the end of Karen Stepanyan’s article “The Relationship of Being to Non-Being” (literally on the next page of the magazine). Stepanyan did not accept the novel at all, considered it a major failure of Tolstoy, and at the end he said, among other things, these words: “The reason for this is the harmful influence of a long experience of writing satirical articles for periodicals (which we read with pleasure), many years of stay outside our native national elements, or deeper, personal reasons - it is impossible to judge ."

Having read Den and Kys in a row, I can now definitely answer Stepanyan’s doubts - “the influence of long experience of writing satirical articles for periodicals” took place. Even if we simplify the problem, we can name two or three or four articles by Tolstoy, from which, in fact, the novel “Kys” grew. The fundamental article, of course, is “Russian World,” written back in November 1993 for the Guardian newspaper. A cruel article, dense, a kind of “Russophobic” concentrate, with which it is pointless to agree or argue, since it is pure art:

“ This is from your point of view, from the point of view of an outside observer, Russia has spread from ocean to ocean, because you, with your straightforward Western logic, believe in the cardinal directions, in the wind rose, in atmospheric pressure, in miles and kilometers. And from the Russian point of view we are HERE. Let's move a thousand miles - and we'll be HERE again. We don't believe in arithmetic. Where we are - there and HERE. So, does it matter where?.. It makes no sense to talk about stagnation, because we live NOW, and stagnation - this is a process, and we don’t understand processes. It makes no sense to talk about destruction, for example, about the destruction of some beautiful temple. YESTERDAY it was, - TODAY it is not. But it can also be the other way around: TODAY is not, but it was YESTERDAY. AND THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY again It wasn’t. Therefore, THE DAY BEFORE YESTERDAY is no different from TODAY, and YESTERDAY is a capricious splash of a wave, it gurgled and then didn’t. Maybe it will gurgle again ."

In addition to the "Russian World", articles from "The Golden Age" were thrown into this "Irish stew" (a stunning review of the American edition of the cookbook by Elena Molokhovets - from there are dozens of pages of "Kysi" related to food and in general with the "national way" of "eating" ) and “On a Lime Leg” (it’s about the love of modern Russians for monosyllabic words, and when you read this article, your head is pounding: “Day” - “Night” - “Kys”...).

Well, in fact, “Kys” is a fictional dilution of this elastic, concentrated journalism. The issue here is not the “harmful experience” of her writing, as Stepanyan believes, but Tolstoy’s genre impudence, which has never been in vain for anyone. "Kys" is not a "utopia", not a "dystopia" and not a "dystopia", as they began to say, and not even a "feuilleton novel", as I first thought, but just an essay - an unsuccessful essay because it is long , sluggish, with many unnecessary fictional retardations.

Why is it written? God knows. Maybe this is actually a parody of “pm-strategies”.

In a word, "Kys" and "Day" are unsuccessful and successful books by one writer. But you re-read “Night” (where the old stories are) - and you clearly understand: this was written by a completely different person and, perhaps, written to the end.

When I left Biblio-Globus, I also bought the latest issue of Book Review, and there, naturally, there was a rating, and on the list of bestsellers Tolstoy’s “Den” was in fourth place. Journalism has suddenly found its way into the orderly ranks of pop fiction - has it happened before?