Vyacheslav Kuritsyn. U

U
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn

Publication date: March 22, 2000

Vladimir Makanin. The letter a . "New World", 2000, #4.

Two years after the overwhelming, verbose and, in general , unsuccessful novel “Underground, or a Hero of Our Time,” Vladimir Makanin again publishes an essay with the letter A, or rather, simply “The Letter A.” The name is blatantly literary and, so to speak, parable-like. The parable turned out to be so. And in terms of volume (two hours of reading), and in tone, and in density of the text: “The Letter A” seems hardly more meaningful than the entire “Underground”. But the point is that the parable is about the same thing. About the underground, about “at the bottom.” In the novel the hero is a homeless person from a dorm, in “A” he is a convict from a barracks.

Something happened in the camp: an old convict came out onto a hillock, sniffed the air and announced to himself - “She!”, meaning that from behind the mountains there was a smell of freedom. Another old prisoner throws tantrums (daily to his superiors, nightly to his barracks) about the fact that prisoners are buried in unmarked graves. It was as if the person’s name was not even called. And the rebel, it turns out, remembers the names of all those who died in the camp over the past few years and blesses incessantly: “Achunin, Bratkov, Vasiliev D., Vasiliev S., Grishaev, Grushin, Dragunsky, Elmachov, Zhikharev, Ivanov N., Ivanov M., Kistyakov, Kramarenko, Mumlaev, Oblomovtsev, Primaisky, Razhkov, Sukharev, Trekhun-Zaizbenny (brother of last year), Troparevsky, Khasnutdinov, Khrenov, Tsitsarkin, Yamtsov!”

In addition, prisoners have fun: running secretly (well, semi-secretly) from the authorities to a high rock, lowering one of them (in this lame phrase a spontaneous quotation from Chernyshevsky was hidden: what, by the way) on a rope from its top and knocking out the word on the rock . Or rather, one letter for now - A. What kind of word it should be headed by, the prisoners no longer remember. Maybe beauty A is meant to stand in the middle of the future word, or even at the end. But the deadlines are long, eternity is eternal, and while work on A is ongoing. By the beginning of the story, the letter is almost ready: another sign... In short, something is happening in the zone, something has happened or is about to happen. There is some external explanation for what is happening, the authorities either know about it or don’t know about it, one day it seems like they are going to tell the prisoners something important, but they don’t. If you guess in the thick of real Soviet history, such an external event could be the death of Stalin, but there are no direct indications of this.

No, no. It is not the cause that is important, but the effect. The relationship between prisoners and guards is changing. The prisoners are willingly taking handfuls of freedom for themselves (to leave the barracks at any time, to see what products have been brought into the camp), and the authorities are not at all against it. The reader feels like he is reading a story about finding freedom. The reader clicks his tongue respectfully: what simple but powerful symbols Makanin found. Names of the dead: a person begins to be seen and valued as an individual (after the funeral of the prisoner-name-keeper, or rather, it was from him that the graves in these places acquired tablets). Letter: creative power. The spiritual undercurrent, the same one that in the story “Where the Sky Meets the Hills” gave rise to the village melod, here gives rise to the letter. Personality and creativity begin to ooze out of the person. Hooray?

Somehow not very cheers. What do free people begin to do? Well, they quit working. They kill their own kind: every night in the camp someone is killed, and there is no authority capable of stopping the lawlessness. They break, of course, everything around. And the parable ends with a convincing scene in the spirit of Vladimir Sorokin: the prisoners decide, excuse me, to shit on the watchtower, successfully do this, and then festively litter the entire territory of the camp. So they came out, you know, from the underground.

It is quite difficult to argue with this morality. Well, yes, Makanin is right. Of course, people who escape from captivity tend to behave like God knows how. You need to be able to use freedom; this is a separate science. It's called civilization. When the revolutionary sailors came to the Winter Palace in 1917, they immediately trashed all the Sevres or whatever porcelain. The matter is well known. One thing confuses me: why bother the kitten with this? Somewhere very close is the discourse of Deputy Astrakhankina. Talk about how freedom has brought us only all sorts of ugliness and there is no ray of light at the end of the tunnel. Meanwhile, in the same 1917, Duchamp exhibited his urinal (the idea to compare it with the fact of excrement in the Winter Palace belongs to Mikhail Epstein), and, by the way, the abundance of excrement in Sorokin is associated with totalitarian culture, it is not the prisoner who shits on the table, but the secretary of the regional committee.. .

That is, no, it doesn’t bother me. The parable is a timeless composition, and, perhaps, in future anthology stories, “The Letter A” will exist as an ideally constructed metaphor for the situation of leaving the barracks. But a contemporary critic comes to mind a simple question: why doesn’t Vladimir Makanin want to leave the barracks? Why, after the homeless person in the dorm, is there a prisoner in the camp? Why does a significant layer of our literature (conventionally called thick magazine literature) never go beyond the bounds of an endless circle of topics? After all, the ideal reviewer for “Letter A” is the aforementioned Chernyshevsky. That's who would be absolutely delighted.

The answer may be this. The "literary community" and the "intelligentsia" in general - not individual representatives, but the masses, the entire camp - do not fit into the new era, do not find their "place in the sun", and therefore, in a certain sense, still remain in the barracks. New social practices and realities are inaccessible and annoying. Well, a lot is known about this. Knight Makanin remains in this truly tragic situation with his class (and one could probably say “with his people” if this quote did not provoke the cynical assumption that the prisoners wrote on the rock AAA): this is both his personal tragedy and - what a strange thing! - he can be called an old camp inmate whose terrible experience does not allow him to write about something else. So let's assume that Makanin composed his parable about Russian literature.

There's something going on... well, outside the barracks. Free. The books “Generation P” and “Blue Lard”, “Mythogenic Love of Castes” and “Azazel”, “Very Short Texts” and “Tales by Telephone” are published there. Attempts by people yearning for strong gestures to jump out of the barracks and quickly crap something are perceived in the wild even without amazement, but with a new sense of guilt. There is nothing I can do to help my fellow citizens who remain in the zone. The letter A, the first, main, beautiful, scraped by hundreds of hands, tells me one thing: you can’t help.