The costs of well -being

The novel by Alexander Arkhangelsky “The price of the cut-off” of the media-sought-demanded novelists, who took the results of the 2000s, settled down in a journalistic way and resolutely rejected the lifted allegory. Following the satirical "decommissioned" Dmitry Bykov, another chronicle of the Russian life of the period of stability appeared - the debut novel by Alexander Arkhangelsky "The price of elimination."

Stepan Abgarovich Melkisarov - an entrepreneurial Muscovite originally from Tomsk, who managed to test his business grip in many areas - from a private car service to large businesses and contacts with politicians. Melkisarov is not yet old, although it is no longer young. In his relationship with a 38-year-old wife, Zhanna reigns a bourgeois lull: the couple know each other too well to be very interested in each other, and life itself, too smooth and measured, creates a clear shortage of emotions. Jeanne is smart, impulsive and active, but she suffered the fate of a bored wife of a wealthy person.

Once she finds a suspicious photo in which Melkisarov is captured next to an unknown girl. This is clearly a mistress, but, judging by some signs, the third -party hobby of her husband is too seriously. Jeanne addresses the experts of the detective case, and they organize surveillance of Melkisarov, but these observations begin to in a strange way to contradict rational ideas about space and time. In fact, Jeanne was framed as she could not imagine: everything that was happening is a sophisticated staging, the purpose of which is to resume dead emotional connections, to shake the standing water of routine well -being. However, the situation develops unpredictably: Jeanne begins an affair with a hired detective, and Melkisarova lies in the extremely serious problems, and not on the personal front.

In some ways, the “cut -off price” significantly resembles Andrei Rubanov’s novel “Life was a success”. Arkhangelski is also about a businessman who successfully survived the catastrophic times of early capitalism in our country and encountered unexpected circumstances in the era of well -being. Both authors give an impressive retrospective description of a stormy entrepreneurial past, pushing flashbacks with scenes that are playing here and now. But the prose of Arkhangelsk, firstly, is much less desperate in tone, and secondly, much more focused on private life. If Rubanov’s story of family ups and downs is integrated into the narrative of criminal games and commodity-money relations, then in Arkhangelsk, rather, the opposite. As a result, the “cut -off price” makes a dual impression: on the one hand, an analytical analysis of the era, enriched with an energetic style and in a very good language, on the other, is a plot for a family television series of the middle hand.

Arkhangelsk - of those who manifest themselves in various fields: historian, journalist, TV presenter, author of books in the non -fiction genre and, finally, the novelist. In this situation, artistic experiments often become an optional appendage to all other activities or a subjective commentary to it and only in rare cases turn out to be a full -fledged new undertaking. From the point of view of the creative career of the Arkhangelsk, the “cut -off price” is a great success, from the point of view of Russian literature - a characteristic model of a revived, but again swift obsolete realistic letter.

08/11/2008 / Kirill Reshetnikov, the material was published in the "newspaper" No. 150 dated 12.08.2008.