| "O.G.I." published a collection of prose by Sergei Soloukh Sergei Soloukh has a strange fate. There is probably no greater “Westerner” and modernist in Russia now than this Kemerovo prose writer. Who else believes so sacredly in the intrinsic value of the poetic word? Who is always ready to endlessly twist metaphorical garlands, reveling in the play of the subtlest sound and semantic shades? Who so submits to the everywhere recognizable hidden rhythm, and therefore grants him dazzling freedom and complete power, as if not even thinking about some kind of reader, and even more so about some kind of problem-idea ? Meanwhile, our ubiquitous and persistent “discoverers of innovators” (“bicycle inventors”) hardly notice Soloukh and, in any case, are in no hurry to praise his dizzying prose.
Much, of course, here can be attributed to “circumstances” - the distance from the capital’s literary scene, the long and ultimately fruitless publishing ordeals of Soloukhov’s first novel “Shizgara, or the Unforgettable Siberian Adventure” at the end of perestroika, its belated appearance in the “unfashionable” Volga "(1993)... You can make the appropriate clarifications by saying that Soloukh’s prose is quite popular on the Internet (by the way, Soloukh is one of the venerable old-timers of the young Russian Internet). But correct reservations will not shake the main (and usual) injustice: He would be Brutus in Rome, Pericles in Athens, but here ...
But here for, relatively speaking, traditionalists, Soloukh is too complex, bizarre, reckless, intoxicated with freedom and music. For patented legislators of rapidly changing literary fashions, it is too simple. Too naive. And - humane. For all Soloukhov’s verbal round dances and quadrilles, flights and breakthroughs, metrization and alliteration, metaphors and humorous quotes are unthinkable without his enthusiastic love for the world and man. Anyone who knows how to love everything - wide-noisy oak trees, fast rivers, flowering fields, cozy dachas, spit-stained city courtyards, wheezing trains, good-for-nothing drunks, dapper athletes, down-at-heel teachers, broken stalls and so on almost ad infinitum - is doomed to write, according to Mayakovsky, about this . So Soloukh writes about how people love, look for love, wait for it, find it, lose it... That’s all he writes about.
This was the case in the still awaited publication of “Shizgar”, in the poem “Unter Prishibeev’s Lonely Hearts Club” (1996; published in Kemerovo in a meager circulation), in the cycles of stories “Pictures” (partially published by “October”) and “Miscellaneous”. Now “Pictures” (twelve stories with “Chekhov’s” titles - “Gooseberries”, “House with a Mezzanine”, “Steppe”, etc.), “Miscellaneous” (six stories with titles borrowed from Bunin - Kuprin - -Andreeva, - “Bargamot and Garaska”, “Seasickness”, “Mr. from San Francisco”, etc.) and “Club...” made up a collection released by “O.G.I.” The poem gives the book its title, which makes sense (we honor major genres), but may confuse some. Because “The Club...” is a bitter composition, but despite the sadly unfolding plot, it is not gloomy. Because even though there is a lot of thick and vile “prishibeevism” (much more than in the stories), it still yields to the pressure of music, light, youth, life. Because even the loneliest hearts are not so lonely when the author and readers hear their pulsation.
I don’t want to interpret Soloukh’s prose at all. (I said about love, and the rest will follow.) I would like to quote, luring neophytes into this fantastically real, blooming, singing, teasing with incredible smells, deceptive in little things, but deeply honest and kind world. It is not the plots that are important here, although Soloukh masterfully builds them both in miniatures and in the wide poetic space of “The Club...”. The most important thing here, as the venerable Vasily Kirillovich Trediakovsky used to say, is the “ringing.” Whoever hears him will not stop loving him. Listen here:
“On Maslenitsa, miracles come out of the trash heap. There, in the stacks and picket fences of forgotten Christmas trees, among the green needles of a recent holiday, with the breeze of a fleeting thaw, yellow balls of chicken fluff appear - summer nests of snowflakes. Year after year, on the night of magical transformation, round dances of foolish mummers in forgotten landfills and wastelands break the thinnest branches, the most delicate paws and knit small bouquets that smell of winter stars. The dancers' boots raise white dust, and the lips of the singers turn it into a bluish fog, and at dawn the entire festive harvest invariably goes to all sorts of morning rogues.
This is how mimosas and a kerosene rainbow of cellulose-cellophane fat sticking to them come to the city” (“Bargamot and Garaska”).
Soloukh claims that the “Miscellaneous” series was intended to become a spring-winter-autumn addition to the jubilant summer-like “Pictures”. That’s how it is, and the transition from winter to spring in “Bargamot...” is depicted with precision and grace, but the summer spirit still dominates in the story. And not only this. They will write about winter even without Soloukh, but he can smell July even in December. And therefore Roman Leibov is right three times, whose maxim is imprinted on the back cover of the newly published collection: “When I think about Sergei Soloukh, a wave of optimism invariably rolls over me; You’d have to be a complete fool not to understand that such a writer could only be given to a great people!” I sign with both hands. Andrey NEMZER |
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