Internal combustion engine

Strong and solid - with the exception of a pair of gaps - the number "Foreigner" : with an amazing combination of green with pink on the cover. Anthony Burdesses opens the book with the 1989 novel “ Iron, Rusty Iron ” (per. From the English A. Pinsky and E. Dobaan). The magazine prints the beginning of the novel, but at first it is clear that we have a huge but elegant metaphor for history.

Meaningful already in the heading.

First, we are talking about the legendary sword of King Arthur, and you really started to get bored. But then the plot wags to the side, and the reader rushes through cities and towns through generations and years: from Titanic and New York to London, and then to Manchester through St. Petersburg - and so on to World War II.

A rusty sword as a metaphor for the meaninglessness of history - as a metaphor for its inherentism, I would say - will make itself felt in the second part of the novel. In the meantime, we have pretty heroes of semi -Russian, half -Collian descent. It is they who make private decisions against the backdrop of global cataclysms of the first half of the century.

In general, another global theme of the novel is luck in history as a way to survive; and how to bewitch this luck to yourself; The epigraph from Gregory Skovoroda about "the world caught, but did not catch" he begs by itself.

But he is not.

And okay.

Waiting for February?

Now about the gaps. This is, firstly, the publication of poems by a Chinese writer named Jan Lan (per. I. Smirnov). This same lan spent in Moscow on the Biennal of poets last fall. And even then he struck the audience with an unusual stroke of his works. If the poetic task of the poet lies in the stroke, then Lyan, of course, fulfilled her. Maybe in Chinese these verses sound original verses - as the translator assures. Don't know. The condition of Russian poetry has always been a living word. Unfortunately, there are no living words in the verse of a lanet in Russian:

False speeches will sound again only if you are heated
The cold grabs to the bones cruelly like this portrait
Frost, of course, allegory fear of him too
A hundred-year-old bird screaming somewhere far away
And the brown frosted ear of the corpse is again allegory , -

Well and so on.

The second gap is the worthless stories of Marie Depichens (per. I. Radchenko). There are completely frozen phrases - it seems like this: "Having submitted to Moram, I watched with fatalism as the children rushed towards fate and did not lead an eyebrow." In fact, everything is easier. A woman came out into the open sea on a yacht, and Baba rocked into the sea, and the one who will turn out to the first hand is to blame.

About this and the stories.

But then there is a completely wonderful novel by Pavel Hulle's Mercedes -Benz. From the letters of Grabal ”(per. From Polish I.Adelheim) - Opus, capable of patching any gaps .

Hulle is an unstable Pole, we had his book “Weather Davidek”, now another work of a cheerful cynical beautiful forty -year -old was put up for court: written almost without paragraphs, a continuous text.

Reception is simple. The hero takes driving lessons from a beautiful instructor (hello to Philip Tussen with a "camera"). Turning a steering wheel along the streets of Gdansk, the hero tells the girl the story of his family, which was mainly due to the internal combustion engine. This, if you like, is a set of jokes, a garland of fables and tanks suitable for the wheel in the company of a beautiful young lady, which, meanwhile, knows a lot about the gearbox.

Oddly enough, it is precisely the “technical approach” that allows the writer to negatively tell the history of his family and country in the twentieth century. The history of the already told thousands of times. In the predecessors of Hulle - of course, Marek Krysko: the householder of the Soviet Poland of the fifties, a cynic and a crook, a dandy of a punks and a drunkard with four aces in the sleeve. There is a pair of curtsy in Hulle's novel by another Polish non-conformist who calls the hedgehog Pilh, singing in the hole of the drinking songs.

But the main missing hero of the novel is Czech Bowumil Grabal, who, in fact, tells the story of "Girls behind the Stuff" Our writer.

Grabal was the most modern, the most avant -garde prose writer of the twentieth century, while having nothing to do with avant -garde barbarians, this corrupt rabble ... Bogumil Grabal from the very last grains, from rags of sentences, wallpaper, wallpaper, photographs, sounds and smells sculpted completely unique phrases, amazing constructions, extravaganza of worlds and stories, moreover His vibrating words always lurked the elegance of Mozart, the power of Beethoven and the melancholy of Chopin, what, ignorant bustles, you think, someone else can do the most ordinary object from the garbage container of our history, and, like Bruno Schultsu, to turn a fragment of an old newspaper to the page of the book that shines with its own, and not Reflected light?

Grabal for Hulle is an authority for imitation. A figure that combined life and literature with his biography. The author who turned literature into an internal combustion engine. The last of the Mogican. Prose writer, not to be confused with a fiction writer (the difference in the engine). It seems like our Erofeev, who lived parallel to the Soviet regime and wrote to himself as God put on his soul. The holy fool and the Prophet, to bow to which Bill Clinton came to drink with a grabal on beer.

It was then that Roman Hulle and rhymes with Burges. More precisely, it logically develops what the Englishman wrote about.

Namely: the story ends in the fact that sooner or later comes to bow to a private person.

Unless, of course, a private person managed to survive in her arms.

Of the poems, I recommend a Mervin of the peak , known to us more as a prose writer, the author of the esoteric "Gormengast". It was written in the forties, but even in translation (Maxim Kalinin), the expressionism of the peak “achieves” the modern reader:

The clock on the tower shouted counterattack
And a decay caught fire,
When from under dull asphalt
A motley -winged horse was spinning into the wild.

The sultan crowned the crown with a bright flash,
The wreath of the constellations knocked out the withers.
Passerby with a black umbrella under the arm
He stopped and laughed.

The number has a traditional “silt” section: origins and history. ”Here you will find a selection of a hundred -year -old materials from the“ Bulletin of Foreign Literature ”, which the editors of“ Foreigners ”numbers in its ancestors. As always, excerpts and quotes, discussions and debate about the literature and prizes of that time amaze with their modernity.

The same passions, the same problems.

Under the curtain, I recommend the essay of Oldos Haxli (per. A. Vlasova and S. Neescheretov). Particular attention is the text “Sincerity in Art” , where the author discusses why sincere and honest people create stroke lifeless works (see Yan Lyan).

The answer is simple - you need to have talent, that is, the ability to put observations available to everyone in the original art form (see Pavel Hulle).

It’s also funny, as it was the essay of the thirties responded after the war at Stravinsky

"Despite the fact that many artists are sincere in their work, their art does not become better, although some insincere (sincerely insincere) works are not so bad."

And with Oden:

"When the critic tells me about the book that she is" sincere ", then you understand that she is: a) insincere and b) is poorly written. However, sincerity, understood as fidelity to himself, should be the first task of any writer."

Huxley was friendly with Stravinsky in America, he recommended that the composer Denen as a librettist. Such a biographical roll call. As for the literary roll call, the fragments about “sincerity” were taken by me from the book “U.Kh. Oden. Reading. Letter”, which I once translated.

Therefore, in fact, I remembered.