What to read with Mikhail Kommersant-Novikov
Melancholy autumn leaves
"In matters of culture, it is not demand that determines supply, but exactly the opposite. You read Dante because he wrote the Divine Comedy, and not because you suddenly felt the need for Dante." Brodsky, as usual, said it bluntly. Poetic Marxism, inverted, also applies to such a mundane area as book publishing. You read another book because it fell into your hands: it would never have occurred to me to be interested in a minor writer of the turn of the century named Mooney, if not for a volume entitled “A Light Burden.” Where are his poems, prose, articles, letters, plus an article about Muni himself (real name Samuel Kissin). Four hundred pages that make you remember Chekhov’s famous vulgarity about how everyone’s life is the plot of a short story. The plot for a small volume in this case is already evidence of an extraordinary life.
Muni is the inseparable friend of the young Khodasevich, a character in the near-Symbolist bohemia of the beginning of the century. He was married to the sister of Valery Bryusov and for this circumstance alone was close to the then literary elite. When the war began, Mooney, without having had time to really do anything in literature, ended up in the army. The melancholy and absurdities of the quartermaster's service finished off the already not particularly balanced poet: in March 1916, Mooney committed suicide at the age of 31.
What kind of person was he? What exactly were the younger Symbolists? This is how the cruel, formula-minting Khodasevich wrote: “Little students of bad magicians, we knew how to summon small and disobedient spirits that we did not know how to control.” Muni's lyrics really do give the impression of unguided exercises. But the context in this case produces a bewitching effect, for which the disinterested reader loves literature. “The trace he left in life, as in literature, is not deep. But - shortly before his death, with that irony that rarely left him, he told me: 'Notice that I was still there.'
I cannot say what inspired the creators of this volume. It is impossible to imagine that any commercial or cultural benefit can be derived from a carefully restored history of the marginalized people of ancient times. Maybe just a monument? But to whom? Why? However, this is the whole thrill. The book about Muni exists simply because it is offered to us, and that is enough.
The characters of Nina Gorlanova, a modern writer who is not very famous only because she lives not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in Perm, are completely marginal personalities, one might say, moonlike. But what was tragically serious at the beginning of the century is now tragicomic at best. Gorlanova’s book, published in the “Master Series,” is called “Love in Rubber Gloves.” The catchy but cheap title reveals, for my taste, the main flaw of this prose: it tries too hard to be funny. "I, children, laughed myself, a sinner, when I read Capa's letter: 'I'm writing to you from the station. There are a lot of people. There is no God...'" After Dovlatov, right? But there is also after the Popovs. Evgeniya: “In 1980, the Olympic Games were held in our country instead of communism.” Valeria: “The broad-shouldered cockroach crawled out to a drop of beer on the floor.” The plots are based mainly on the description of the difficult lot of a woman writer and contain both ups and downs of literary taste. Nina Gorlanova always encountered these failures, and, apparently, this is an organic and conscious component of her narrative style. As a result, her prose leaves the impression of walking along the littered corridor of a communal apartment, where there is a bicycle and a washtub on the walls, where the toilet is always gurgling in the dark depths, but where cheerful anti-Soviet people nevertheless live.
"...The walk remains in my memory to this day. There were no palaces or cathedrals on our way. But at every crossroads, at every gateway, Alexander Alexandrovich drew my attention to something special, attractive in its own way, It was worth it (he didn’t say ‘need’) to take a closer look: this is also ‘beauty’.” This approach, which somewhat rhymes with the guidelines of Gorlanov’s fiction, but gives completely different results, is described in the preface to the memoirs of the collector and art connoisseur Alexander Trubnikov (1882-1966). Trubnikov is from a noble family, his father was the Oryol governor. (If you want, you can, while reading, compare the son of the then Oryol governor with the son of the current one.) Trubnikov graduated from the School of Law, traveled a lot in Europe and began publishing in Apollo under the pseudonym Andrei Trofimov. Since 1917 - in exile. From the Imperial Museum to the Flea Market is his first book written in French, published in 1935 and won the French Academy Prize. “In this den of poverty, insects and overcrowding, my attic enjoys the amazing advantage of extraterritoriality. Having once been a chamberlain of His Imperial Majesty, assigned to the Hermitage Museum, and now a chamberlain of a furnished room and the caretaker of a gallery of ghosts, I learned magic in the vile rooms of Paris — between yourself and the surrounding commotion, lower the protective canopy of your thoughts.”
The aristocratic, strange style makes us remember such a Russian Parisian as Gaito Gazdanov: the same wavy, extended, clearly not Russian, but not alien to our ear intonation looks like an original technique, a successful stylistic experiment. In fact, if we can say that the mass publications of emigration authors somehow “enriched” this-worldly literature, it is only when we mean that specifically European, primarily French, intonations have entered Russian prose. Ideas in literature are of secondary importance: they arise after words and facts. And they are always disappointing - both from Muni and from Gorlanova. And from Trubnikov: “Do I regret that my guiding lamp broke? Should I try to glue it together with sophisms and set off again in its dim light? The death of the empire, and even the whole world, cruelly proved to me the futility of all things.”

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 172 dated September 22, 1999, p. 10