Return

There are only four stories, Bores wrote. The second and a little third - about the return. That's what we'll talk about.

The other day, Sergei Zhadan finished his new, “real”, well, like “Modes Mod”, not in novels and stories - a novel. It is called “Voroshilovgrad” (this is now Lugansk, there they put billboards for Stalin without any noise). Two provocative excerpts appeared on the network, as usual, which did not cause any criticism or at all reactions of an enlightened public ( http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=118730194816892&id=748082932 http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10878189583158&id=748082932 ). This novel fully meets the Borkhesian classification - the category is the second and a little third. The hero returns to where his childhood passed. Not even in the nineties, even earlier, in the eighties, but in spirit - in the seventies. Everything changed, of course, and yet - there were people, leisurely and unpredictable, names, names, hot chalk mountains, a blue sky with clouds rushing to the north, a warm river, May still green grass, endless fields of corn and sunflower. I remember this, I lived there, if you can live in Macondo, Yalivts or Yoknapatof district.

According to Andrukhovich’s well -aimed remark, our country is now plunging not even in the nineties - in the seventies. The red flags of the long-dead country at the state institutions of “independent Ukraine” ( http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=100709029975835&id=748082932)- only correctoring sign on the fields of this text: paragraph over the paragraph of elegant people floating from the paragraph of elegant people floating from flowers to the memorial to the fallen Soviet warriors, their whole pages, pouring on festive squares, ornate vignettes of fireworks, title odes of parades, touching tears of the elderly. To say “this has not happened for a long time” is to say nothing. I poorly remember the “ninth of May” of the seventies, it was small, but in my opinion-never the case. Then people still remembered where they live and what it means.

I think for my grandmother the seventies was the happiest time. After hunger, war, devastation, poverty, hunger, hard labor, war, evacuation, hunger, dugouts, poverty, ruins, devastation, hunger, poverty, hard labor, construction barracks-she had a one-room apartment with electricity, gas, sewage, hot and cold water, a radio, a refrigerator and even a black and white TV, she had a pension of 40 rubles in 40 rubles (the documents lost the plant during the evacuation), 4 hundred marshy land in two kilometers walking and still some kind of health. “Stability”-modern Ukraine, this word is so familiar in the last election. I think this stagnation - hot, viscous, sunny, fragrant, and warm stall in the winter - was the happiest time for the Soviet Union. A modest reward with obedient strained backs in the eyelids of ordeal. Moreover, in the seventies, toilet paper finally appeared ( http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=119768151385292&id=748082932 ). Of course, this arcadian stagnation soon ended. The grandmother lived until 2001, found the fall of the twin towers, but could no longer realize him.

People from the planet of the USSR, I really feel sorry for you. Is it true. I understand you. I myself lived in the seventies, it was my childhood - bright colors, acute feelings, burning joy of knowledge. There will be no more seventies, people. Even your shepherds with iron straps and colorful electric comics carefully tell you about this. Even the purest emotions and the most sacred rituals of the past are powerless here. And even the radical magic of the dolls of the communist parties stuffed with a jerk and the challenge of the ghost of Stalin-Velzevul from hell is not powerful over time.