Children, don't quarrel

A recent interview with Lyudmila Ulitskaya at the Afisha made a lot of noise. Like, they don’t take the interview like that, the interviewer does not ask questions, but attacks a poor woman. Anyway - who he is. He is Lev Danilkin , and his interview with Lyudmila Ulitskaya is only part of the puzzle.

Another piece of puzzle is passionate, for Danilkin an unusually sharp article about the “green tent”: “L. E. Ulitskaya <...> achieved her: it is quite obvious that it was those who whispered to themselves to the mantra “for your and our freedom” - and not those who screamed from the space “went!” - and there are genuine heroes of the century. ” Hear the grinding of your teeth?

Finally, not the last but key piece is Danilkin’s book that has just been published in the Housing and Economics. Now everything falls into place: Danilkin-for several years already vaguely hinting that yes, he writes a biography, but no, he will not say whose-all these years is cherishing the “idea of ​​Gagarin” (“not a bad or good state, but a cash state of matter,“ physics ”-there is something that needs to be overcome; to come from physics to metaphysics”). And then Ulitskaya appears with its dissidents, a private story, complete indifference to space, an organic rejection of a large project-it is clear that the “green tent” becomes a red rag for a person, on whom everyone showed his fingers three years ago: he wrote, hehe, 600 pages, funny to say, about Prokhanov.

This dispute could boldly glue the label "Westernik U. against Slavophil D." And sending a catchard card to the archive: it is obvious that a compromise is impossible in this dispute. U. ultimately reminds D. that he would have to serve the common cause, if it would have had to be in Kolyma; D. states that the service state promoted by U. is unacceptable primarily for aesthetic reasons (the thought of Alexander Sekatsky). However, it would be unreasonable to bring Danilkin’s book to the statement about who was good and who is bad in the USSR . “Gagarin”, of course, about this too (at least because this is not a telephone reference book), but in General - about something else, about where the an alienated world rolls into the “Hell of the Eternal Football Championship”.

After all, really, the world in which the thin-shaped vampires poke a button aea-girl, and the world in which brave captains are landed on new planets-which of them ... no, not more attractive, there is a more objective criterion: which one is more literary, or what? (We are here about literature, right?)

After all, here's what is funny: the army of vampires and werewolves, Harripotters and patrols, in general any govnophastasti - all these are purely rational things, to real mysticism, to the world of real supra -sensital relations that are not the slightest relationship. Danilkin manages to show in his book that if anyone wants to really look beyond the edge of reality and see the abyss of the otherworldly, such a person would be better to focus on the figure of the Major of the Soviet Army Yu. A. Gagarin .

No, Gagarin, of course, is not Christ, writes Danilkin, but (such is the property of the Russian language-denial never works; garlands of paired negative constructions always leave a vague impression of the statement) all the same, yes, a little Christ. Gagarin pierces, like a grain on Easter, Gagarin transforms the “spiritual properties of the environment”, Gagarin performs miracles (he gets something, knocks out something again: “Not the mother of Teresa”), Gagarin expels demons (in the summer of 1961, dudes were gone in Moscow), finally, what would you think, Gagarin made on April 12? Paid the road to Paradise ... It may seem nonsense in delirium only in the awkward retelling of the reviewer; But the way of writing Danilkin is such that in one phrase he always sounds two voices at once: the voice of the rationalist and the voice of the mystic. This optics makes it possible to speak many very important things - without be recognized as insane.

All this is what: without mystical experience, there can be no literature at all, that is, only the literature can be bad; Beautiful is such a root crop that grows flowers here, and roots on the other side. And therefore, in the rational world of vampires and social networks, in the world of Zuckerbergs and Rowling, in a world rotating around a million dollars as an imaginary axis, there can be nothing beautiful by definition.

And so if the idea of ​​Gagarin is slandered and ridiculed - beautiful (everyone remembers how κόσμος translated?) Dies. And the fact that the art of the word is rapidly lost (we are here about literature, yes?) - only part of the general process of decline and devastation: what literature is already here, even if the “mace” does not fly.

Finally, the last (in time, in any case) a piece of puzzle: Yuri Gagarin Lev Danilkin, and the Green Tenter Lyudmila Ulitskaya-in the Long List of the Big Book, announced at the week of the Long Long list . That one of the three premium places is guaranteed by the book about Gagarin, Viktor Toporov has already written , and this is very similar to the truth. But it’s hard to imagine that without a “big book” they left Ulitskaya, right? If so, then in the autumn both Ulitskaya and Danilkin will rise on the stage in Pashkov’s house - that’s the funny thing.

On the part of the state (and the “big book” is a prize, in general, state) it will mean: children, do not quarrel, here you are on candy, do not prevent your dad and mom from working.