Arkady Dragomoshchenko. This does not threaten us.

It’s hard to say that the anticipation for the St. Petersburg magazine “New Russian Book” was excessively tense. Our time, marked by the flaring and dying trajectories of various publishing enterprises, has to a certain extent diminished the pathos of anticipation of “intellectual feasts”.

However, if the situation is more or less usual with magazines addressing visual practices, then publications that devote their pages to the Book, the conditions of its existence as a certain thing that always has an open secret, as well as the climate it creates, the meanings formed in the process of entering in everyday life, and even in the very rules of everyday life and circulation - this kind of publication, despite the declared modesty of its tasks, remains a field of endless discrepancies . Because reading, apparently, is a journey in circles not so much of “ideas” or meanings, but of motivations. And if the former are subject to our effort/intention, then the motives of writing-appearing-reading ultimately form a pattern, the observation of which sometimes produces a striking effect.

It must be assumed that not only a direct interest in studying the paths of books in the landscape of the market or the variability of the very topography of this market prompted Igor Nemirovsky, publisher of the Academic Project, to undertake the publication of the journal New Russian Book, but also, perhaps, some dreaming (as without it) is about getting closer to the metamorphoses of the relationship between the book and the reader, between the reader and the critic, and finally, between the critic and the author. Between history and books per se.

A little more detail about other details in the following conversation with the editor of the magazine “New Russian Book” Gleb Morev.

Arkady Dragomoshchenko: First of all, is the experience of editing the magazine “New Russian Book” your first; Of course, I am leaving aside your participation in the preparation of various book publications - the same, for example, the 1934 Diary of Kuzmin...

Gleb Morev: No, of course, this is not the first experience of working in a magazine. It all started a long time ago, ten years ago, when with Mikhail Berg and Mikhail Sheinker we made the first issues of “Bulletin of New Literature”.

A.D.: Frankly, I didn’t know this detail...

G.M.: And yet it is so - I was one of three editors. Before that there was the Moscow samizdat magazine "Equinox", much later - the experience of working in the St. Petersburg "Seance"... All these projects quickly faded or transformed, reality was rapidly changing, people, and myself, moved in space... So Now, together with Ira and Misha Grobman and Sasha Goldstein, I am taking part, to the best of my ability, in editing the literary magazine "Zerkalo", based in Tel Aviv... Now, however, everything, I want to believe, has become more stable - I mean " New Russian book."

A.D.: Do you think the magazine in question is entering into competition with publications that have the same goals, namely, covering events in the book market? Or does its concept involve creating some kind of niche of its own?

G.M.: The New Russian Book project in the current situation does not compete with anything or anyone, except, of course, for the New Russian Book, published in Berlin in 1922. Our publication is based on the idea and principle of expertise. We want to offer the reader, potential book buyer, an expert journal in which he could find responsible, informed and authoritative assessments of book products. Our task is to stratify the market, on the one hand, and on the other, to help the reader in the current truly tragic situation of the widest supply, reducing the randomness of choice/purchase to a minimum.

A.D.: As far as I understand, we are talking about, so to speak, the “territory of experts,” and my curiosity is quite natural: who determines the measure of competence of an expert, specialist, and how, in fact, is it determined?

G.M.: If you may, it is determined by us - the publisher Igor Nemirovsky and me - and it is determined quite traditionally. Since we have entered the media market, we are confident enough to focus on convertible names, that is, “the names of our authors speak for themselves.” These people have many years of experience in cooperation in special and mass media and, as they say, are well known to the reader. A specialist gives a review of the book. Speaking about the responsibility and authority of the review, I had in mind precisely this situation, the situation of our first issue: Timenchik writes about a book dedicated to Akhmatova, Arkady Ippolitov writes about the baroque, Lena Fanailova writes about modern poetry, Zolotonosov writes about prose, and about the latest translations Barthes and Bataille - Skidan with Lapitsky. At the same time, it is especially curious - for me, at least - an unbiased statement fraught with paradoxes and non-standard optics, when, for example, Elena Georgievna Rabinovich, the famous classical philologist, translator of Apuleius and Petrarch, analyzes Dmitry Volchek’s “Code of Perdition”, and Andrei Levkin, distracted from the political news feed www.smi.ru, takes on Andrei Bely.

A.D.: However, no one is stopping me from asking you: do you really think that, say, people living in Kaluga will treat Michel Foucault or Roland Barthes with the same reverence of expectation as the residents of the Petrograd side?

G.M.: Frankly, I don’t think that the quality of perception and pleasure from the texts of Barthes or Foucault depend on the geographical factor. In St. Petersburg, Kaluga, Moscow, as well as in Paris, these texts can be read with equal success, and in the same way they can remain misunderstood and unread. Our magazine is not a St. Petersburg or Moscow magazine, it is a magazine that is addressed to readers in Russian and is focused on the Russian book market as a whole.

A.D.: I beg to differ with the note of mega-claim that I heard. Because, like you, you will probably share my opinion: not a single magazine can become a mirror of this boundless market imagination that goes beyond the horizon... Probably, the point is still in selection. In the selection of certain authors, a certain class of literature. But what is this literature, and how can it be described?

G.M.: Of course, you are right, and I am speaking, without a doubt, not about the entire market, but about a certain segment of it, which can be easily outlined based on the criterion of quality : for us, literature and a reader of a certain level are priorities. The notorious “wide readership” is important, but ultimately optional. Of course, exceptions are pleasant. As an example, we can name the latest novels by Pelevin or Sorokin. On the one hand, it is difficult to call them masslite, and on the other hand, one cannot turn a blind eye to their remarkable success.

A.D.: And let me, dear Gleb, find out your personal attitude towards this not popular, but quite successful literature?

G.M.: (pause, laughter). I will answer as a magazine editor. As an editor, I found it impossible to limit myself to one review of each of these books and chose to give two mutually exclusive assessments. I more or less agree with some of them. In this case, this question (my personal assessment of the mentioned authors) is not so important, the important thing is that “sociologically” I am simply obliged to present the entire spectrum of opinions. Only this representation of these phenomena looks correct.

A.D.: There is an opinion that there is no single literature. Over the past 10 years, we have been able to partially verify that this judgment is somewhat correct. That is, literature exists in various sections, strata, and this stratification depends on many factors - education, gender, sexual orientation, age, upbringing, and so on. Is it possible to assume that the literature you choose to describe covers all these strata, all these layers?

G.M.: I think that our literature is not for a narrow circle of readers. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that this literature is addressed to a number of communities - the readership indeed consists of so many groups. I think that thematically and genre-wise our magazine covers a fairly wide range of titles, which, by the way, is reflected in its structure - it is divided into several sections: Russian literature, foreign literature, memoirs, historical and philological literature, art history and philosophy. In addition, a number of modern texts come into our field of vision, which we define, with the help of Bukowski and Tarantino, as pulp fiction . These are the books that, in our opinion, it makes no sense to consider individually. They exist in their sometimes indistinguishable multitude, realizing, rather, a certain trend, interesting not so much from a bibliographic point of view, but for understanding the state of mass culture as a whole. In the first issue, for example, such a review is devoted to the modern Russian female detective story. The second is planned for men.

A.D.: And if you became the editor of a completely independent magazine (the fun flares up with extraordinary force) , what would you put on the cover of the next issue - a portrait of Valery Podoroga or a naked Claudia Schiffer?

G.M.: For me, it is absolutely not necessary to reveal this, so to speak, dichotomy... But if there is no third option, I would combine them on the cover into a collage... In general, I intended to preserve Arnstam’s magnificent 1922 cover. In my opinion, she is more convincing than any glossy physicality. By the way, quite unexpectedly, Arnstam’s son is now in St. Petersburg - he came from Paris to prepare his father’s spring exhibition at the Russian Museum. And he’s not at all offended at us for the surprise - replication of his father’s old work, he just asked for a copy of the magazine for his home archive.

A.D.: And as a PS - this is not exactly my question, but still the question: “Is it fashionable to be an intellectual?” In this regard, let me remember my friend Marcel Enaff. On the eve of the last French presidential elections, he tirelessly wandered after university to gas stations, where he could find some French newspapers. So, when Chirac won, Marcel said that for more than fifteen years Chirac moved in their circle - philosophers, writers, critics and so on - and that this communication bore certain fruits: Chirac became different... Consider this a prerequisite last question.

G.M.: Well, I think that the French model of relations between the intellectual and political elites is not very relevant for Russia - this does not threaten us. Is it fashionable to be an intellectual?.. In Russia, as elsewhere, it is fashionable to be a fashionable intellectual.