The most European Argentine
Julio Cortazar turns 85
85 years ago, one of the most popular Latin American writers in Russia, Julio Cortazar, was born. Unlike such South American soil writers as Gabriel García Márquez or Jorge Amado, whose works are for us behind a certain ethnographic barrier, Cortázar has always been perceived in our area as a European writer.

For the newest generation of Russians, the discovery of Europe hardly poses any problem: why open there, get a ticket and go. For those who grew up and matured under Soviet rule, the only way to be convinced that another life existed and was even somehow comparable to ours was books. Julio Cortazar, an Argentine who lived most of his life in Europe (he worked as a translator at UNESCO), turned out to be almost the ideal author for this educational task. In the way he built the European mise-en-scène of his stories, one can feel the naive contemplation of a stranger, the eternal surprise of a provincial boy, and the vigilance of an heir who takes possession and looks around the ancestral lands like a proprietor.
However, the regional charm of Cortazar's short stories does not in the least overshadow his strong plots, like a good log house. Suffice it to recall such a story as “The Pursuer,” where we are talking about the jazz musician Charlie Parker, an artist who, for reasons that are inexplicable at first glance, drives himself into a deadly dead end. Who among us has not seen such artists, who has not tried to help them, knowing in advance that help is useless? Or the story “Another Sky” - about a successful clerk, in the suffocating veil of family well-being and career success, remembering a cheap street prostitute with whom the poor man was only happy. Finally, the plot of “The Devil’s Drool”, glorified by Anthony’s film Blow-up, is also archetypal: the tragedy of someone else’s life, accidentally witnessed, irreversibly changes your own and yourself.
Cortázar's novels, for the taste of the 90s, seem ponderous and overcomplicated - the kind of things only a reader with unlimited resources of free time could revel in. However, they also reflect Cortazar’s amazing youth, which never depended on physical age. The impression is that the writer, who lived to be seventy, even in his old age wrote each of his works with a desperate, transcendental impulse, which is experienced by a person who picks up a pen for the first time. The sincerity of this effort provides Cortázar’s works with a simple but rare quality: opening his book at random, in any place, you read to the end.

MIKHAIL Kommersant-NOVIKOV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 153 dated 08.26.1999, p. 10