Translated material
Oleg Karelin. "After Pelevin"
Oleg Karelin
Date of publication: October 26, 1999
A. Tsvetkov. Sidiromov and other prose. - M.: "Gileya", 1999. Circulation 1000 copies.
The fact that something wrong has been going on with literature for a long time is no secret to anyone. However, apparently in order to at least somehow navigate the mass of printed text, I don’t know who, but there was a person who spoke for the first time about “literature after Pelevin.” Moreover, we must pay tribute to the Gileya publishing house, which has the courage (even for hooligan reasons) to publish authors who are not engaged and (at least for now) little known.
Here is a new book from the publisher’s series dedicated to modern writers (by which here we should mean people who are trying to express something in words and even letters on paper in the old fashioned way). The author, Alexey Tsvetkov, is better known as a radical anarchist and writer of provocative texts in the Radek magazine. Oddly enough, there is not much to say about the book itself. In any case, it can be called a good debut. Although it is surprising that such a radical person in other forms of life makes a very serious attempt to write high-quality and fairly independent prose in a completely human language, the existence of which we have somehow begun to forget.
I will quite deliberately not retell the contents of the book here. It will be even more interesting to just read it. Already because for our literature in its current state, an attempt to create one’s own world is far from the most typical phenomenon. And the terrible reality of Tsvetkov-Sidiromov, even if marked by reading books (including the same Pelevin), is quite individual. By and large, the book perhaps lacks integrity. The texts that make it up are too varied in format. However, you never know what the author really wanted. Perhaps his goal was to lose the hero somewhere between the pages of the book - either in the wild steppe, or on an old sofa, in the company of neighbors behind the wall, who stubbornly want from him some kind of normality that only they understand. Moreover, from the author’s point of view, everyday life is far from the best that exists in our world, where at some point, sometimes, you suddenly want to kill your neighbor. Because he might want to kill you.
And a few words about why, in fact, “after Pelevin”. It seems that everyone has long ago successfully forgotten those glorious times when the first stories of a certain young prose writer appeared in the magazine “Science and Religion,” which later formed the debut collection “Blue Lantern.” In addition, Pelevin penned a certain number of texts, the first and main purpose of which was to eliminate unexpected voids in the published issue. Among them is a text worthy of a real monument. It was called, it seems, “Fortune telling by runes” (however, since it’s been so long ago, I could be wrong).
But probably everyone remembers this. The country was gripped by a fortune-telling mania. Runes were sold at every Soyuzpechat kiosk. It seems that not a single printed publication, with the possible exception of deeply partisan ones, could do without reprinting or publishing its own version. It was a triumph that no one noticed. The real beginning of the famous writer Pelevin as a person capable of manipulating public consciousness.
What happened next is known to everyone and does not require additional comments. Only a few people noticed one small feature of Pelevin’s latest books. A curious reader, looking at the output data, will find there two proofreaders with extremely interesting surnames: Lisovsky and Zhechkov. And if you happen to have friends who work in advertising, they will explain to you that the novel “Generation P,” as well as the appearance of the above-mentioned citizens in the credits, is a competently presented story about modern advertising, moreover, overshadowed by very big names.
I do not at all deny Pelevin’s unconditional talent. But for him (and for many other authors belonging to this generation), playing with technologies of power or, if you like, the ability to impose and instill some kind of one’s own truth is much more important than actually working with words.
The more valuable and interesting the attempts to simply write in human language become. And the unwillingness to be content with the truth, which for some reason the neighbor in the house, literature, country, TV or planet is convinced of.
PS As the author of a review of the first book in the series, I would like to note several points that, for some reason, were not mentioned in it. First of all, the above text was written long before the famous event on Manezhnaya Square. And the potential interview with Dmitry Pimenov, whom I really consider a noteworthy author, did not happen rather on my initiative. If only because it is quite uninteresting to be one of too many. And they were attracted to things that were completely unrelated to literature. As for the opinion expressed in some publications about the “unknown writer Pimenov,” who is earning scandalous popularity, here, it seems to me, everything is somewhat more complicated. Such a path would be too complicated and risky (and hardly effective).
After all, popularity is an extremely ambiguous phenomenon. And it doesn’t always intersect with real advantages. Does the name of the wonderful poet from Rostov-on-Don Vitaly Kalashnikov mean anything to many people? Or the fact that perhaps the best battle prose of the last decade belongs to the pen of the not-so-famous author Armen Asriyan? However, such a list could be quite long...
Maybe earlier (one is tempted to say “in the old days”) we simply read more? Or was the attitude towards literature different? There was simply a time when a book was a book, separate from advertising. Perhaps we will come to this later. Someday that same literature “after Pelevin” must happen. We have already forgotten what was “before” quite well...