Stereo text

Ekaterina Zavershneva. Between two heartbeats. / Ekaterina Zavershneva. Somnambulist. - St. Petersburg: Limbus Press, K. Tublin Publishing House LLC, 2009.

Here is the plot: school years and school itself. A girl is in love with a classmate. He doesn't know about it.

Years go by, students move from class to class. Her feeling doesn't go away.

The young literature teacher, who had just graduated from high school, managed to establish the warmest relationships with her class. The guys go to visit her, together and separately, and trust her with their most secret things. She values ​​their trust and keeps their secrets.

Such a plot would be unconditionally classified as children's and youth literature and the genre of a school story. A writer from St. Petersburg, Ekaterina Zavershneva, managed to turn it into something different.

Her heroine - that same schoolgirl - comes into the story twenty years later. She walks through her hometown, where she left long ago. She takes your breath away - the rhythm of her breathing is conveyed to the reader through an open technique, so convincingly motivated that it does not look like a stylistic study, as is usually the case with open techniques. Between the passages, which work as dramatic pauses, and the “crossed out” marks, which also work for the plot, there are fragments of an internal monologue, which, as the heroine deepens into the world, loses punctuation marks and capital letters, turning into free verse:

"(crossed out)

Yana walked through the streets, recognizing and not recognizing

the city has retained only the essentials

poplar fluff, cracks in the asphalt, volleyball courts and tram lines

porch without steps

double frames, pots of geraniums, ashtrays

I could stay and live right here on the stairs

(everything is correct, but who cares)"

Again a beating. Again “(crossed out)” . But this time the plot assembly point is closer to the surface: punctuation marks and capital letters are in place, the epic becomes on par with the lyrical. And through the beat, the epic begins to prevail - until the external again gives way, and the heroine is again left alone with her heart in some kind of transitional space that Dostoevsky loved so much: on the stairs, on the threshold, in the corridor.

Yana, who had already graduated from university and became a Muscovite, came to the city of her childhood to formalize her inheritance, sell her apartment and return to her adult life. When she remembers this, the plot flows into epic forms. On the street—it’s a small world, especially in small towns—she met her favorite teacher, with whom she corresponded for a long time after school. Including about your enduring feeling.

After a new rephrase, only without crossing out: “ And you know, he still visits me.” Don’t be angry, but I gave him your letters . twenty years later ” The teacher, who revealed her secret to him , made an appointment for them to meet at her place. And then she conveyed through him that they did not need to go to her.

He took her to him, not to the teacher. And from this moment on, its dramatic elements come to the fore of the text - between the passages it is no longer a descriptive narrative or an internal monologue, but dialogues.

He regretted that he didn't know anything. Because he was also in love with Yana. And everyone thought that it was the teacher who arranged for him and Yana to be on duty together - but they were unable to say anything to each other. As teenagers, they did not know what to do with love, and simply avoided each other, experiencing everything in the depths of their being. Or maybe it was that they felt with the instinct of youth: the heartbeat is the main thing here, nothing else is needed. All other body movements are no longer about that. “This is my first time climbing these stairs. Strange. Why didn’t it occur to me then, say, to ring the doorbell and run away? Also an action."

“If only one of us had been more decisive...

- Do you want to talk about it?

- Not anymore".

And here they are adults - uninteresting, in general, people who don’t know what to talk about: he is a modest university teacher, she came to hang around the offices... In the background of their meeting is an aged teacher, whose life has developed in a typical way for a teacher. “Don’t be angry with Verochka. She's unhappy, I feel sorry for her. And, like all unfortunate people, he takes care of those around him, is engaged in arranging their destinies,” says as an adult he , already accustomed to typification. The teacher introduces an anachronism into the proper course of things. “How could we not put an end to this matter? Teacher automatism. Errors must be corrected with a red pen ."

What should they do now - adults who know all the ways out of all situations? First, tell family stories - they still don’t know anything about each other: about parents, grandparents... Then talk about present life. And then?

The continuation of the school story threatens to develop into banal adultery - which, in general, is what happens, although not immediately, at the level of the external plot. Which would be exactly the case if it weren’t for the internal plot.

If it weren’t for school literature lessons, which became an inoculation against vulgarity for them:

“We are extra people, Yana. You know, I read it. You have an “A” in literature.

If it were not for the memory of childhood, every now and then bursting into where the logic of adult actions unfolds:

“As a child, ice cream was eaten too quickly. It dripped, however, exactly the same. I'm talking nonsense, right?

- And you lick your fingers.

- So what".

If not for reflection:

“While we thought that everything was ahead, the promise itself was happiness.

You would say - banal

But the non-trivial is a side branch of fate, cut off long ago as unnecessary. There is neither you nor me, and in our place there is phantom pain . "

And not heart failures - or, in the language of adult logic, inability to behave:

“A conversation from fragments, an arrow to silence, it is everywhere, we are a random pattern, grains of sand, a wave comes and retreats, strings remain, seaweed, it starts to rain, and I don’t even have an umbrella to offer it to you. “But I’m not going to go home yet.” - Sorry. You're probably bored. - Do you want to send me out? - No. I just don't know how to behave. And I already said this . "

These changes in depth and surface are equivalent to changes in plans in cinema, accompanied by the corresponding work of light and sound. Following the characters' attention either to their own experiences or to what is happening around them, the rhythm, intonation and graphics of the prose change. Blurring the boundaries of epic, lyricism and drama within one text, the author made it three-dimensional, stereoscopic, and the simple story began to sparkle with many nuances that enriched it.

And with all this, before us is a classic story, as Belinsky defined it: a fragment from life that casts a light on the whole life.

In my opinion, no one has worked with the genre of the story so interestingly for a long time.