Because their meaning is transparent

In the Gilea bookstore you can find not only the books mentioned in the review, but also much more. Especially if you stand on the stairs (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

It seems right to start with publishing debuts. For example, here’s some good news: “Foreign Woman” has resumed publishing the book series. Let us remember that “IL Library” was already published during the years of perestroika. There, in particular, Nabokov’s “Lolita” appeared for the first time in Russia as one of the impressive signs of the advent of new times. Then, under the cloud of everyday circumstances, the book activity of the magazine somehow imperceptibly curtailed. And now the “Illuminator” series has taken off, and quite confidently at that.

Romain Gary, one of the most significant authors of post-war France, was discovered by the Russian reader in the mid-90s. And having opened it, she strengthened her success in every possible way by publishing several of his novels in a row. The Porthole book series opened with A Promise at Dawn, perhaps Gary's most poignant novel. And while these notes were being written, “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd and “Slowness” and “Authenticity” by Milan Kundera also arrived. So we can talk about the existence of the “Illuminator” series not only as a project, but also as a fait accompli. In its new life, the IL book series plays a significantly different role than in the past. If in former times it served to fill cultural gaps and played a primarily educational role, now, when we find it difficult to navigate the flooded sea of ​​translated literature, the series is called upon to become a kind of standard, because it has long been the case that “Foreign Literature” is universally recognized chamber of weights and measures of the translation profession. The task is not easy, but honorable.

More about translation books. The publishing house "EXMO-Press", known mainly for the in-line production of large-circulation tray and station products, from time to time suddenly decides to publish something worthwhile. For example, a book called “Mirror of Perfection. Stories of Wandering Sufis,” in my opinion, is worth reading. Parables and stories from the life of dervishes, as well as their sayings and teachings, are provided with commentaries and historical references. Quite interesting and instructive. The design, however, is terrible: the cover is not even an example of the Middle East, but of some kind of gypsy chic. Gold over emerald - isn't it beauty? But inside the book, I repeat, is decent.

Local fiction is also not ignored by publishers. The New Literary Review, which began with books primarily of an academic nature, is increasingly turning its attention to contemporary Russian literature.

Explaining who Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov is is the same as explaining what modern Russian philology is. Gasparov's fame as a philologist and translator from time to time takes tangible forms in the form of awards. Recently he was awarded another, symbolic in the sense of material content, but an honorary prize named after Andrei Bely. He received it as a prose writer for the book “Records and Extracts,” parts of which were published in several issues of the journal “New Literary Review.” Now this book has been published as a separate edition in the same - which is logical - “New Literary Review”.

It is difficult to determine the genre of this wonderful book, because it is a genre unto itself. Life, academic and literary observations, snippets of dreams, fragments of memories, aphorisms, quotes, poetic translations, footnotes and comments flow into one another in the most free manner, collectively constituting what, in our opinion, is modern literature. Four of the seven sections of the book are organized according to the principle of a dictionary (from A to Z), where the title of the fragment is a certain “key” word. A fragment can take up a dozen pages, or maybe one line. Here is a typical example: “Beilis. There was a conference in Kyiv for the 80th anniversary of Beilis, Yu. Sh. wrote to me: “Beilis is dead, but his work lives on.”

If “Records and Extracts” represent a kind of literature that blossomed at the intersection of genres - a diary, a quotation book, notes for memoirs - then the book by Ivanov-Razumnik, published by the same publishing house, the content of which, if not exhaustively, is revealed with utmost clarity in its title "Writers' Fates. Prisons and Exiles" is an example of pure memoirs. More precisely, memoir journalism.

A well-known writer in his time, whose friendship was valued by Blok, Bely, Sologub, Klyuev, Yesenin, a man of a fantastic fate even for the first half of the twentieth century, who served under all regimes and authorities, a man who did not change and never hid his convictions, put before with himself and as best he could, he fulfilled his life’s task: to remember everything, to understand everything, to tell about everything. What is important here is not only the text, which is wonderful in itself. The historical context is also important: the book was written back in the forties, long before “Kolyma Tales”, “Ivan Denisovich” and “The Gulag Archipelago”. Testifying to human suffering, the author is least concerned about presenting his fate as a “walk through torment.” The writer treats his own misadventures without any pathos. “Let the reader not think,” he writes, “that, talking about everything I’ve experienced, I consider myself a sufferer who suffered so cruelly from the Soviet regime: years of prisons and wanderings! That’s the point, compared to others (millions!) I suffered very little: I was not sentenced to an isolation ward, I did not spend time in concentration camps, I was in exile in big cities, during interrogations I was never subjected to any weighty “arguments” from the investigator - how many could boast of this? Of course, European concepts of law are completely others; but I’m talking about life in the Land of the Soviets, where my fate was still one of the easiest.” This was written, mind you, in 1942.

The Vagrius publishing house does not lose the vigorous rhythm with which it publishes prose books by current Russian authors one after another. For example, in the so-called gray (formerly “black”) series, “The Closed Book” by Andrei Dmitriev was published, which, in addition to the novel of the same name, also included two stories - “The Turn of the River” and “Voskoboev and Elizaveta.” Andrey Dmitriev is one of those authors whose names roam the shortlists of literary awards and whose new works invariably become objects of increased attention from newspaper and magazine criticism. It makes sense to pay attention to the book of stories by Asar Eppel, which appeared in the same series, under the general title “The Champignon of My Life.” A dense, rather inventive, ornamental (maybe even a little too ornamental) style will definitely find its connoisseur.

Published in the same "Vagrius" - but outside of any series - the famous poem by Venedikt Erofeev "Moscow - Petushki" is equipped with a preface by Evgeny Popov, as well as detailed comments by Eduard Vlasov, which are approximately seven times larger in volume than the text of the poem itself. If we also take into account the list of sources, and, on the contrary, do not take into account the rather tasteless illustrations, then we can say that this seems to be an academic publication. Created, however, at the request of Japanese “academics”-Slavists, which involuntarily gives the comments some comedy.

Another publishing campaign also showed clear signs of academicism. There is, although clearly not indisputable, but nevertheless a stable opinion that Ilf’s “Notebooks” is more significant and more important than both “Chairs” and “Calf”. What is more important and what is not more important is an idle question, but the fact that “Notebooks” is outstanding Russian prose is, for me at least, beyond doubt. The publishing house "Text" has undertaken a complete edition of them, prepared and commented by the writer's daughter Alexandra Ilf. Plus an abundance of original drawings and handwritings. Plus photos from the family archive. In general, the publication is what we need. Here is one of the entries: “We will still die to the music of Dunaevsky and the words of Lebedev-Kumach.” And so it happened. This is a recording from 1937, Ilf’s last year.

Most of those who are familiar with the name Igor Pomerantsev are regular listeners of Radio Liberty, where Pomerantsev has been hosting the “Over Barriers” column for many years. Some, for example readers of Itogi, know him as a subtle essayist - an observer of life and language. Few people know him as an original, unique poet. And this is a pity, because Pomerantsev is a poet par excellence, and his poetic texts are the essence of all his other texts - prose, essayistic, radio. "Why dragonflies?" - this is the title of a book of his poems, published by the publishing house of the St. Petersburg magazine “Zvezda”. The poems collected in it are mostly quite elegant free verse, the phraseological and intonation repertoire of which refers not to the domestic, but rather to the English-language tradition. The poetics of Pomerantsev’s poetic experiments, among other things, once again demonstrates the conventionality and transparency of inter-genre boundaries. Speaking of transparency. In the last poem of the collection, the book’s bizarre title is explained as follows: “Why dragonflies? / Yes, / because their meaning is transparent.” The book was published with noble asceticism, as if “poorly”.
And Alexander Mikhailov, a specialist in identifying marginal geniuses and bringing them into the light of day, publishes his series “Library of the magazine “Solo”” in a completely poor, even defiantly poor manner.

In the introductory note to Mikhail Ivanov’s book “Banana,” Mikhailov testifies that “this entire book was essentially written in Kashchenko,” where the author regularly receives treatment for binge drinking. In fact, this is what the book is about. In this regard, one could justifiably note that this is not such a unique topic for our latitudes if the book were not so excitingly interesting. If you try to retell this fragmentary confessional-memoir-diary narrative in a nutshell, you will get a rather banal story about how a person who was most gifted in every sense - from art to life-building - failed to flourish creatively. But judging by the way the book is written, it turns out that he seemed to have succeeded. Banana (and “Banana” is the author’s nickname acquired in childhood) is the hero of the book of the same name. Although unsteady, the distance between the physically existing author and the author-character is achieved in an old but reliable way - by transferring the painfully obvious “I” into the projection of a third person. "Banana" by Mikhail Ivanov is another evidence of the strict rule: no one ever really knows in what exact place lies what he has been looking for all his life.