Karen Ghazaryan. What's good for a Russian?

What is good for a Russian is death for a German
Yaroslav Mogutin. Romance with a German . - Tver: KOLONNA Publications, 2000.

Karen Gazarian

Publication date: July 3, 2000

Journalist, reader and writer

And the small-format building, a pocket book, looks like a typical example of “airport” literature. An unusual cover for a familiar audience: one shirtless shaved guy in a deserted interior looks at the back of another shaved guy. And no explanation like “The Enchanted Soul Series” or “Desire” or anything like that. Readers accustomed to “he laid her, smelling of morning freshness, on the crisp sheets and squeezed her heaving breasts with his tanned hands,” may not stand the test of the text contained under this modest cover.

Critical journalism plays with Mogutin like a multi-colored ball, throwing it towards Rimbaud, then Mayakovsky, then Yevgeny Kharitonov and demonstrating “impartial analysis” - the next stage of understanding the phenomenon after the sanctimonious oohing and groaning caused by Mogutin’s 1994 article "Dirty ends of Komsomol members." A completely natural dynamic. So if tomorrow Mogutin is canonized as a saint who innocently suffered from state, social and literary inertia, no one will be surprised.

Korney Chukovsky said about critics who like to draw parallels: “eunuchs-classifiers.” It seems to me that there is nothing more contrary to Mogutin’s essence than cultural continuity and tradition. In this sense, not every comparison is flattering for him.

Against the mainstream

Hitler was by no means a handsome blond. His double-black bangs fell onto an eyebrowless face with a vulgar mustache, in the depths of which huge whites of his eyes fluttered. Goebbels was a dwarf, looking like a rat in profile; together with himself and his wife, this freak ordered his angelic (according to contemporaries) children to be shot. Goering resembled a Soviet party boss who had gorged himself on delicacies from a special distributor. And if the charm of Soviet totalitarianism lay entirely in the image of a withered and pockmarked leader, embellished by Dmitry Nalbandyan, then the German fascist attractiveness was constructed according to the scheme: strength + beauty of the middle and junior command staff. It’s not for nothing that the SS uniform was invented by Coco Chanel herself.

Young soldiers and officers of the Wehrmacht, exuding cold rudeness and excellent health, were the basis of the art of Nazi Germany and were in no way like the Soviet tank crews and pilots who smiled simple-mindedly from movie screens as they waddled to their dusty combat vehicles. There was nothing conciliatory about the fascists, nothing proprietary.

The homoerotic subculture fetishizes this entire environment tirelessly. A wonderful example is “The Death of the Gods” by Luchino Visconti. Visconti, who did not like to talk about his homosexuality and spoke of homosexuals with contempt, nevertheless revels in the spectacle of naked, muscular Germans to the waist, scurrying around his screen in huge numbers and irritating his eyes with their chiseled napes.

The immodest sexual charm of fascism has been studied far and wide and has long become a commonplace. But Mogutin did not write a novel about commonplace. Rather, this is a novel about public places where people constantly use him and he uses them. And Mogutin declares the above-mentioned cultural theme in the first part of his multi-tiered work and exhausts it there. The free-thinking Russian teaches abstract thinking to the politically correct German Peter, who cannot understand that Zionism is no better than fascism, and Maoism is no better than communism, and in general all isms are the same shit (but what about anarchism, Yaroslav Yuryevich?).

Do Russians want war?

It is impossible to get rid of the feeling that the lyrical hero abandoned a representative of the German race not only for the sake of a black youth, but in addition for his hopeless stupidity and wild boredom instilled in him. Having set a cleverly thought-out chronotope on the first pages, that is, deliciously describing the American Valley of Death, so that the reader would imagine cocaine concentration camps, drill fields and phallic symbols of guns recreated in the minds of the characters, Mogutin almost mid-sentence breaks off all these allusions and moves on to everyday life, where the German is not one of those Germans, and there is nothing good at all. Laughing at the literary tradition, Mogutin carefully equips his mini-novel with an epilogue and small, almost three-line chapters telling about the subsequent fate of each of the characters. Each of the three lines breathes with a premonition of an imminent liberation from them and from the memories associated with them.

And then Mogutin’s other texts follow in retrospect. The book is looped: starting with the very last prose work, it ends with the very first - “How I stole in Paris.” The energetic Protestant ethic of an individual who does not want to die of hunger mixed with radicalism, antisociality and an all-consuming sense of protest. And non-stop sex: street, motel, parking, store and whatever else pleases the discerning reader.

Strauss has the waltz "Perpetual Motion". When Yaroslav Mogutin's PSS comes out, you can come up with the name "Eternal Body Movements" for it. I say this without any hypocrisy and completely forgetting about irony. Only by having a good command of literary technique can one ensure that the description of the same process does not get boring not only on the fortieth page, but also in the fourth book written by Yaroslav Mogutin. You turn these pages, watching how the author lays out subordinate clauses and participial phrases on them. Lays out without piling on top of each other, unlike copulation scenes. The absolute symmetry of these scenes in the category “aggressor / victim / aggressor / victim” is almost invisible and therefore even more striking.

Favorite of the Moon

If a film is made based on Mogutin's works collected in "A Romance with a German", then only one musical accompaniment is possible: the Montague and Capulet theme from Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet". Upward and downward flows. And the entire two-hundred-page text, and perhaps Mogutin’s entire work, is one big metaphor for this constantly two-faced “lunar” love. Passive and active roles combined in one person are not just a physiological substance, but softness and frenzy, anger and pity, aggression and despair. Mogutin throws everything that comes to hand into the trolley pulled by the locomotive of this simple discovery: anti-communism, communism, fascism, anti-fascism, hatred of the rich, from whom one must extract money for love, and contempt for the poor, who are unworthy even of this. The train travels, making its way through a tunnel of sadism, after which there should come, it seemed, “the final resolution of issues concerning both of us” (from a letter from Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson before the fight with Professor Moriarty near the Reichenbach Falls). But it doesn't come. It's not coming! This is why he is eternally, eternally, eternally defeated.

Apparently, this is what distinguishes literature from non-literature. A gap with the world that cannot be filled with anything other than text, and even then, a new lacuna immediately appears. That’s why we have to, spitting and vomiting, jump over fascist homoeroticism and the candy-colored American subculture. At the same time, throwing his own stamps around. Already by the middle of the first opus, the reader will understand that blacks, Puerto Ricans, and sometimes even Russians are also good Germans, and, having reached the work entitled “Bloody Mess,” the reader will be convinced that a better German than a Jew cannot be found. But then the Germans sitting inside spoke up. Chekhov had some inert slaves who had to be squeezed out drop by drop, while Mogutin had the Germans, cruel and sadistic. His alter ego, who caused so much evil and pain to the humiliated non-Germans who longed to touch the best breast of the winner. Carriers of prostituted pseudonyms from the classifieds sections of New York gay magazines. And he shouts to them by name: “The performance is over, dirty whores!.. Andreas, Reinhold and you too, Tom!”

So I wrote all this and thought: is this Russian really that good? Compared to a German?