Very short review

Publication date: March 7, 2000

Very short texts: Towards the anthology: Compiled by Dmitry Kuzmin. - M.: New Literary Review, 2000.

In 99% of cases, the anthology is a mass grave. However, here it is the most adequate form, allowing the reader to finally understand that a new genre has appeared. That is, it actually did not appear today, but the book makes a new impression, for which thanks not even to the authors, but to the compiler Dmitry Kuzmin. "The Shape of Time" with its accelerated pace, one might say, repeats Vyazemsky and Belinsky.

You read “Very Short Texts” in a row - of course, you like some more - but you almost don’t pay attention to the fact that each subsequent piece is by a different author (there are a lot of authors in the book). Of course, you will also understand how differently different authors write, but only later. Apparently it's called a genre.

It becomes clear that the genre is in fact - and not just because Tynyanov and Bakhtin said so - a living reality of literature, a hero participating in literature on an equal footing with the author and the specific text. It’s hard to understand without your own experience, but the genre is not a scholastic abstraction from a textbook. It becomes clear what contemporaries, for example, Zhukovsky and Batyushkov, were worried about, why they did things that were meaningless, from the point of view of a descendant, - they wrote countless elegies, ballads and poems, seemingly extremely similar to one another. It seems a priori that this cannot happen again in modern “personal” culture. That is, with detectives, let’s say, this is so, but here, as they said under Zhukovsky, “high literature.”

What it doesn’t look like at all is “poems in prose,” although the festivals of short prose that preceded the book were called Turgenev’s (more accurately, they would be called Rozanov’s). But in general, the feeling of a living genre is opposed to definitions. The book is so unified that attempts to propose a classification seem unnecessary (the approximate nature of the classification is clear to the compiler himself, this can be seen from the intonation: “Towards psychologism”, “Towards everyday life”, “Towards satire and humor”, “Towards lyrics and prose poems” ", "Towards an essay", "Towards a parable"). The feeling of a living genre is not the ability to list the rules by which it is built, not the ability to describe this “narrative” according to Propp. Recently I had to listen to how the prose of the so-called “new realism” was described “according to Greimas” (as the researcher himself said). For some reason it was unpleasant to listen to (precisely unpleasant, I understand that this is a fact of my biography).

We need literature to be poked in the face in hardcover and in the publishing house “UFO” (I wanted to say that it was not like that in the days of “Rural Cemetery”, but I’m not sure about that). Books by individual authors (Dan Markovich, for example, who is in the anthology) seem to not exist. The anthology compiled by Kuzmin is indeed literary news, although the news is quite old (as stated in the preface, the earliest texts in the book are already 20 years old).