Lev Danilkin. Author for those who don't want to grow up

Alexey Slapovsky. A book for those who don't like to read. - M.: Grant, 1999.

And Lexey I. Slapovsky, a citizen and patriot of the city of Saratov, a regular on the Booker short list, lux ex oriente of capital critics, author of the famous “Questionnaire” and the newest “ Money Day” , is a verbose writer, stylistically uninteresting and, in a commercial sense, unpromising. This is so as not to get drunk from the very beginning: Slapovsky, they say, is a graphomaniac.

This is if you evaluate Slapovsky’s prose (and especially his latest collection) according to normal general literary criteria: language, plot wit, composition, psychologism, what else. Texts by A.S. - a simple set of words: prose writers for some reason often think that the structure of a phrase, rhythm, phonetics - all this is not necessary for them, and they write, as they say, play around. The plots are intelligible and even less so: either the money was found, then the leg was crushed on the tram, then the wife left. The wife left everyone. Stories and anecdotes crawl from Slapovsky’s pen like cockroaches. All the more striking is the fact that Slapovsky’s texts, even completely ugly in all respects, are, on the whole, quite attractive. There are, you know, people who professionally play some ridiculous instruments: a metallophone, a triangle, a drum, maybe. And while all ordinary writers, to the best of their abilities, are tormenting, so to speak, harps and violins, Slapovsky is playing on his metallophone - loudly, with feeling and, perhaps, incendiary. I am a sincere admirer of Slapovsky.

I think he was positioned incorrectly from the very beginning. Of all the current Russian writers, he is the only one who could become an excellent children's writer. Creating infantile discourse is a rather specific writing skill; in Soviet times, only Nikolai Nosov fully owned it. (A.S.’s novel “Money Day,” by the way, is an unconscious, presumably, remake of “Dunno in the Sunny City.”) Children’s discourse is designed for a special reader and is built not on some simplified language, but on some specific assumptions: the reader and the author are on the same team, the reader cannot accuse the author of being talkative, the reader does not participate in overly complex games. “Field of Miracles” is like that.

In a brief annotation to the “Book for those who do not like to read,” it is said that A.I. Slapovsky considers his works written in the spirit of anti-absurdity: infantile consciousness is the way to overcome absurdity.

It is based on an amazing childish logic that organizes dialogue and, in general, contact between speakers according to its own rules: thus, an adult opponent can always be persuaded, read something like a notation to him, and take him with reasonable naivety. Slapovsky’s signature trick is a courtly monologue: before getting hit in the face, a rebellious person will certainly (in “you”) prove to the offender that, in fact, he is wrong and he does not have sufficient grounds to resort to violence. After which, most likely, he will get punched in the face, but he will continue his monologue in the next similar situation. Slapovsky’s Saratov seems to be woven entirely from these redundant statements: they settle on commercial stalls, killers, banks and other extra-linguistic attributes of a new life, turning the city into an infantile phantasmagoria.

It should be noted that the problems of Slapovsky’s characters are much more absurd than life itself in the city of Saratov: in “Questionnaire,” a successful crossword puzzler suddenly wants to get a job in the police and is afraid that they won’t hire him; In “Money Day,” three friends don’t know how to spend 33 thousand dollars found on the street. “A Book for Those...■”, “Russian Originals” and “War of the Stooges” abound with similar difficulties - one needs to seduce everyone, another needs to make an incredible fortune on a bet in two years, a third is worried that John Lennon was killed. The retelling harms Slapovsky’s reputation: one can seriously take him for a graphomaniac.

Infantilism does not mean graphomania.

“A book for those who do not like to read,” as follows from the author’s preface, will be pleasant for those who do not particularly like literature. ⌠They start reading, they get bored, and the story is already over!■ But the point is not that the stories are short: each frame situation (family quarrel, sexual experience, plumber’s visit) is processed in two operations: the participants in the situation become only functions of their actions (Sergei was tired of his wife, Anna fell in love with another man, the plumber drank right at work), and then they are sorted into certain types (clearly described in the encyclopedia of “Russian originals”). ⌠Russian originals. A brief encyclopedia of outgoing types of the outgoing era■ - like an auxiliary aid for reading Slapovsky’s other prose, a kind of Bradis table that allows you to predict the actions and speeches of each type in known situations. Slapovsky's heroes are terribly unmaneuverable: intellectuals, killers, rednecks and adulterers primarily belong to their strange ideal communities and are ready to do anything to maintain this belonging - children are so instinctively stubborn. Even a Redneck can refuse money just to remain a typical Redneck. The removal of psychologism and typification, in fact, greatly simplifies the reader’s work - everything has already been done for him. All that remains is to trust the author. It is this infantile reader’s strategy for perceiving the text that is suitable for Slapovsky (whereas today’s adult reader knows as well as twice that that the author belongs in the cemetery, that the text is inherently aggressive and filled with ideologies that need to be caught, deconstructed, etc.). Slapovsky creates for himself a completely different reader: not so much a moron whose mouth is drooling, but a simple-minded one, a kind of ingénue.

Slapovsky is Mamleev in reverse: in principle, his Saratov communal apartments are inhabited by characters no less monstrous than those in Moscow: but if Mamleev’s people continually fall into some kind of hell hole, then Saratov residents, on the contrary, are more likely to fly out of their apartments somewhere - then the beautiful is far away. Both directions, of course, are equally fantastic. And the monologues of Shatun and other “metaphysical” people about the absolute and the kingdom of evil are, in essence, no less ridiculous than the hot tirades of kind and drunken Saratov residents about faith in humanity. So then a simple problem of reader preferences arises: who likes watermelon and who likes pork cartilage. Children are naturally drawn to sweets.