| Old, new and supernew
The publication of the Literary Guide "Polish Constellation" in the eighth issue of "IL" is timed to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair, of which Poland was the guest of honor this year. Serving in Soviet times as a kind of “window to Europe” (in the sense of familiarization with current Western culture), this country, after the final fall of the Iron Curtain, fell into the “dead zone” between Russia and the “real” West, turning from an object of cultural interest into a shuttle zone business. Meanwhile, over the past 20 years, Poland has given the world two Nobel Prize winners in literature, which is exactly double the corresponding figure for Russia. It is they - Wislawa Szymborska (new poems translated by Asar Eppel ) and Czeslaw Miłosz (fragments of the book of essays “The Roadside Little Dog” translated by Valentina Kulagina-Yartseva ) - who open Litguide . Next to the superstars are names well known to us ( Krzysztof Kieslowski , Stanislaw Lem , Tadeusz Ruzewicz ), and authors of the new generation ( Jerzy Pilch , Olga Tokarczuk ). Particular attention should be paid to fragments of Ryszard Kapuszczyński’s book “Ebony” (translation by Sergei Larin ), which has become a Polish bestseller in recent years in the “non-fiction” category. This collection of essays about Africa makes an attempt to describe those deep and mystical levels of culture (and not even culture, but existence in general) that continue to determine the real life of the continent, despite all the colonial and post-colonial games of political reorganization and economic modernization.
Litguide's main literary text is Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski's sentimental "theatrical story" White Night of Love, written last year and becoming one of the last works of the patriarch of modern Polish literature. The hero of the story, Lukasz Kleban, is an émigré theater director who became famous for his productions of “The Seagull” and “White Nights,” in which, by changing the endings, he tried to give the texts of Russian classics (which he idolized) some new dimension. In one of the versions of the epilogue of this story (in which autobiographical motives are clearly read), the author partly anticipated the circumstances of his own death, which followed in early July in Naples, a little over a month after the trip to Poland, where Herling-Grudzinsky was given a ceremonial reception.
A contrasting and sharp counterweight to the predominantly lyrical “Polish Constellation” is provided in issue 13 of the stories by the enfant terrible of modern Italian literature Aldo Nove - an explosive mixture of Irvine Welsh with Beavis and Butt-head in a masterly arrangement by Gennady Kiselev ; some texts are quite worthy of two warning stars (not for children or the faint of heart).
They got along
The next book in the "ILluminator" series (Publishing House "Foreign Literature") was the novel by the American T. Coragessan Boyle "East is East" (translation by Grigory Chkhartishvili , Leonid Motylev and Inna Bernstein ). Due to the circumstances of his birth in 1969 (his mother is Japanese and a fan of rock music; his father is a restless American hippie guitarist, who was brought to Japan by the fashion for exotic oriental instruments), Hiro Tanaka, quickly left an orphan, finds himself in a “gap” between two cultures: the Japanese, with their heightened vigilance for ethnic purity, see him as a stranger, and America, which he knows about only from distorted descriptions, seems to him to be the promised land, where, of course, there should be a City of Brotherly Love. However, the real America, where Hiro ends up after escaping from the ship, turns out to be different - incomprehensible and hostile. Absurd and tragicomic situations arise spontaneously, presented by the author from several points of view, each of which is fair, but obviously incomplete: for Hiro, the whole world has for some reason taken up arms against the defenseless samurai; Americans catch an illegal immigrant and a dangerous criminal; Objectively, the whole story can be described by the phrase “an elephant in a china shop.”
The volume of the text is given by a spectacular alternation of narrators: the reader learns about what is happening alternately from a dozen different characters, the main of whom are Hiro himself, the ambitious and untalented writer Ruth who sheltered him, and her lover Saxby, who is obsessed with aquarium fish. The title "East is East", generally speaking, is deceptive, since the novel is primarily about the West - more precisely, about all that familiar way of life, which from the outside can be perceived as an alien civilization. The main success of the book is that the global theme of cultural conflict is presented easily, inventively and ironically. And in his descriptions of literary-bohemian mores (half of the action takes place in a private “house of creativity” called Thanatopsis House), Boyle reveals himself as a brilliant satirist.
How many are there, where are they being driven?
The publishing house "Terra" published in the series "Two-Faced Clio" the book by Aldous Huxley "The Demons of Loudun" (translation by E. Voronova ). Huxley has always been distinguished by his interest in extreme, borderline states of both the individual and society as a whole. In the dystopia “Brave New World” (1932), 16 years before Orwell, he described the totalitarian state in a logically complete and inhumane (despite the general happiness of his subjects) version, and in “The Gates of Perception” he began searching for a way out to a different reality through the expansion of individual consciousness . “The Demons of Loudun” is an unexpected book for Huxley (this is a historical-analytical study), but only at first glance: the true events of three hundred years ago have become here ideal material for demonstrating universal socio-psychological mechanisms. A banal personal intrigue unfolding in provincial French Loudun (the church ministers disliked their young colleague Urbain Grandier) gradually develops into a grandiose tragic farce. Grandier is accused of witchcraft, which contributed to the fact that the humble novices of the Ursuline monastery were possessed by evil and insidious demons. They try to cast out these demons with the help of public acts of exorcism, which turn into obscene and obscene spectacles, disfiguring the psyche and morally disorienting both their participants and spectators. Huxley especially focuses on the fact that the activity of “demons” is, in fact, the result of the fight against them: the exorcism procedure, which contained elements of hypnotic suggestion, ultimately gave rise to that demonstrative behavior that was interpreted as demonic possession.
The reasons that prompted Huxley to take on such exotic material become clearer when we consider that the book was published in 1952. “Demons” for the author is a highly relevant concept: Huxley constantly draws analogies with German fascism, Soviet (and Eastern European) communism and American McCarthyism (“witch hunt”). With good intentions, Huxley makes it clear, the road to hell was paved and continues to be paved: any ideas and beliefs, moving into the category of authoritarian dogmas, necessarily turn into their opposite, which is invariably confirmed by documentary evidence of old and new history. Alexey MIKHEEV
|
