Alexander Lyusy. Dictionary-symposium

Dictionary-symposium
Russian writers of the 20th century: Biographical dictionary / Ch. ed. and comp. P.A. Nikolaev; editorial team: A.G. Bocharov, L.I. Lazarev, A.N. Mikhailov and others - M.: Great Russian Encyclopedia; Rendezvous - A.M., 2000

Alexander Lyusy

Publication date: December 1, 2000

No matter how much Milorad Pavich influenced the development of Russian literature in recent years with his “Khazar Dictionary,” a worthy “dictionary” summing up of literary results was still carried out here in a traditional, purely dictionary form.

There are now a great many good and different dictionaries being published. However, this “difference” is often deceptive. No matter how you change the name along with the color of the cover - “Big Encyclopedic Dictionary”, “Russian Encyclopedic Dictionary” - 80 percent of the materials migrate from the “Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary” (and updates are not always for the better). The historical and cultural multi-volume “Dictionary of Russian Writers of 1800-1917” has become a wonderful reference book, but its publication is delayed, smoothly moving into the next millennium, and, naturally, it does not concern modern literature.

The just published “Dictionary of Russian Writers of the 20th Century” provides a personalized panorama of Russian literature of the outgoing century. In terms of representativeness - aesthetic, political, geographical - it surpasses any encyclopedic publication on this topic, including the Cossack and Terrace dictionaries. 600 personalities include representatives of all genres - from socialist realists to postmodernists - and all waves of emigration. But the main value of the book is that it touches on the current literary process. Along with Akhmatova, Nabokov, the four Ivanovs (Anatoly, Vsevolod, Vyacheslav and Georgiy - the alphabetic principle is coldly indifferent to subordination) there are Iskrenko, Kabakov, Pelevin, Prigov (with the brilliant absence of Lev Rubinstein). In conceptual articles one can hear the voices of both the writers themselves and critics, often arguing with each other. The 211 authors of this dictionary, most of whom are people with academic or famous literary-critical names, moved away from the encyclopedic monotony and staged something like a scientific debate. So you don’t experience the usual encyclopedic fatigue when reading. The controversy is accompanied by theoretical developments. G. Yakusheva, starting from the ideas of Andrei Sinyavsky, discovers a new type of classicism in the work of Mikhail Bubennov, and N. Leiderman and N. Rozin discover a combination of harsh naturalism and surrealism in Konstantin Vorobyov’s story “This is us, Lord!”

Of course, this first-of-its-kind dictionary is not without its shortcomings. It is impossible to embrace the immensity and include in a not so weighty book all those who write in Russian (remember that the USSR Writers' Union alone had 10,000 members). Along with the discoveries of little-known names, gaps are also inevitable (although almost none of the writers, so to speak, of the first row, are missed). I did not previously know about the existence of a very prolific “knowledge person” Gusev-Orenburgsky, who went to seek recognition in New York, but was unable to increase my semi-legendary information about the Zdanevich brothers.

Even more questions arise when turning to modern authors. Not everyone will accept the conceptual exclusion of Chingiz Aitmatov, Gennady Aiga and Vasil Bykov stated in the preface on the grounds that “the main source of their creativity is in their national spiritual element . ” Sometimes the authors of articles fall into fiction, which is quite funny for the genre of dictionary articles. Yuri Mineralov, the author of an article about Alexei Prasolov, shyly refers to Vadim Kozhinov, who “will later write laconicly and succinctly about the tragic zigzag that happened in the poet’s life ,” but what exactly this “zigzag” was remains unclear. The publication would benefit from a name index (including not only writers), and, ideally, an index of works.

Many necessary clarifications and additions will certainly be made during the second, two-volume edition of the dictionary, work on which is already underway at the Great Russian Encyclopedia publishing house. Still, it is easier to sum up the literary results of the century from the bell tower of the next century.