Dmitry Kuzmin. Against the "Bronze Age"

Against the "Bronze Age"
Dmitry Kuzmin

Date of publication: September 1, 2000

I heard the expression “Bronze Age” for the first time in 1991, at the first scientific conference in Russia dedicated to the work of Brodsky. I was a student then, wrote a short report, the meaning of which was that Brodsky’s early (early 60s) poems were written in line with the symbolist creative method, and we went to the city on the Neva together with my classmate, friend and comrade in the then small literary group "Babylon" by Alexey Manannikov, the author of extremely charming haiku. Subsequently, Lesha committed a number of strange actions: he changed his last name to “Lobkov”, citing some complex family reasons, gave up writing and in the end, according to rumors, became a fairly major figure in a religious and philosophical sect following the teachings of Gurdjieff. And then we listened with a smart look to all sorts of philological (or more so, near-philological) stuff, spent the night at the station (Lesha suffered more - because of his boots that were soaking wet, which there was nowhere to dry) and were happy in our own way. Now I am writing about this because, firstly, it is always pleasant to remember past happiness, and secondly, the end of the poet Manannikov (and his transformation into the sectarian functionary Lobkov) is felt by me as one of the significant losses of my life, and, thirdly, because moving on to the actual topic of the “Bronze Age” is boring and disgusting for me.

So, at that ever-memorable conference I had the opportunity to hear a speech by a man known to literary bohemia under the name Vladislav Len. He took with him to the department several sheets of Whatman paper, dotted with multi-colored circles, squares, and triangles drawn with a felt-tip pen, and began to explain about the “family tree of the Bronze Age of Russian verse.” Each geometric figure on the diagram meant a certain literary group. The process was presented in motion: decades were postponed vertically (starting from the 50s); the paradox was that the groups meant historical ones (i.e., the parties that actually developed in the space of uncensored literature), and development was spoken of in the sense of poetics; and since biographical proximity and the proximity of creative principles and practices are by no means required to correlate, the method presented in this report was reminiscent of an attempt to predict the route of a bus based on the composition of the passengers traveling on it (individual things may well be guessed, but in general the task is completely stupid). Nobody dared to argue with Len, and only the elegantly sarcastic Mikhail Lotman noticed that the diagram would take on a much more logical and complete appearance if we assume that the vertical scale is not years, but degrees.

And from then on, the expression “Bronze Age” is tightly connected in my mind with some kind of total inadequacy, with a mathematical formula that looks like “2x2 = stearin candle.” But even if we ignore this, this expression cannot suit me in any way. Not least because of the appeal to the notorious cultural model of the “golden age”, which affirms the idea of ​​steady deterioration and decline as the essential basis of any development. It is clear that the golden age is slightly better than the silver age, the silver age is much better than the bronze age, and then the centuries without a name begin, the centuries that remain beyond the top three, and the further it goes, the more desolate and hopeless it becomes. A good prospect, then.

The real history of Russian culture in general and literature in particular looks completely opposite: the “silver age” is much richer and more diverse than the “golden” (Pushkin) era, and the current era, it seems to me, has long surpassed the beginning of this century in scale and quality of achievements. And one more thing seems significant to me: the formula “Bronze Age” smacks of a bad fetishism of the name (in its opposition to the term). When characterizing an era as an era of, say, postmodernism, one has to take the trouble to explain what this actually means, what properties of the era are meant, etc. The characteristic “Bronze Age” is a pure gesture of naming: we call it the Bronze Age , whatever it is. And then you can calmly do without understanding, to the question: “What is this?” - answering: “This is our Bronze Age.”

If we leave the labels and turn to the reality of which these labels are an unsuccessful attempt to grasp, then first of all we must say that we are, in fact, facing an era. The problem, apparently, is that eras sometimes begin at a more or less definite point, but end somehow blurred (the same “Silver Age” definitely began with Bryusov’s “Russian Symbolists”, and when it ended - who knows?) . The current era began, of course, between 1956 and 1959: from that time, in both capitals, the existence of uncensored literature began as a special, independent cultural space (before, in addition to the Land of Fools called “Soviet literature,” there were only fragments of the former world like “Cherkizovskaya” groups" around Sergei Shervinsky and individual islands in the darkness like Roald Mandelstam). By the early 80s, this space took on a rather orderly appearance: with its own magazines and publishing houses (circulations from 5 to several dozen copies - so what?), its own literary events, clubs and studios, its own literary awards and information exchange mechanisms (among other things , and with its own rules of interaction with official literature: high-profile literary “cases” usually stemmed from violations of the rules of interaction between two spaces - take, for example, the stories of two almanacs, “MetrOpol” and “Catalog”).

Then the end of the Soviet system happens - and, it would seem, the era must change. However, this did not seem to happen. Over the course of several years, the space of the former uncensored literature practically absorbed and destroyed the space of the former official literature, throwing the pitiful remains of the latter into several ghettos and reservations - and now we have a single space, roughly speaking, from the "New World" to the "Mitya Magazine", and in In this space, the vast majority of key roles are played by people from the world of uncensored literature of the 50-80s or their direct heirs (an expressive example is the composition of the book series of the Pushkin Foundation publishing house, which offers the cultural and literary public a certain new mainstream: about fifty books have been published, and the above does not apply, perhaps, only to two authors: Bella Akhmadulina and Inna Lisnyanskaya - both, however, through Metropol had some connection to uncensored literature). So, since the personal composition of the system-forming figures of Russian literature has for the most part been preserved, in relation to the beginning of the 90s we have to talk not about the replacement of one era by another, but about some mutation within an era: a mutation during which the relative importance of parts within the whole changes.

Another possibility to raise the question of the advent of a new era is associated with the emergence of a significant number of new bright authors, whose writing would change the most fundamental ideas about literature. This, I must say, did not happen either. Taking with all seriousness the phenomenon of, say, Viktor Pelevin, I cannot help but point out that, on the one hand, he was not particularly supported by anyone in his or younger generations, and on the other hand, much in his letter one way or another has precedents in Mikhail Berg, Mikhail Weller, Sergei Yurjenen and a number of relatively senior authors. Thus, it turns out that our literary era is the last 40-odd years. This means, in particular, that not only Brodsky or Sapgir, who just passed away, but also Aronzon, Sokovnin or Krasovitsky are our contemporaries.

Why does this circumstance seem significant to me? Because in relation to contemporaries in art, it is legitimate to speak not about inheritance, but about common property. The inheritance can be accepted or not accepted. Roughly speaking, it lies in chests: everyone is free to come up, put their hand in, choose what they need - or not to approach (of course, if you don’t approach at all, you will walk naked and barefoot, because there is nowhere else to take it from - but to which It is at the discretion of the subject to approach from the chests and what exactly to take out).

With the commons it is different. Firstly, it changes all the time, because all the time someone is working and creating something new. It consists of living, pulsating connections, which are quite difficult to disassemble into separate, so to speak, wearable things. Whoever does not own all this property (well, at least the absolute majority of these connections, the dense air they form, which supports the shape of everything that exists in this air and at the same time forms it itself) - does not own it at all. A person who is not involved in this single cultural fabric, this text of current literature, who is not a co-owner of this common property, is, as a rule, not its co-creator, remaining a graphomaniac and an amateur (regardless, of course, of membership in writers' unions and similar random circumstances). But even if, more than aspirations, such an “outside person” manages to create something worthy of attention - it would be more accurate to say that it is not he himself who manages, but something inadvertently created by him, not fully understood and realized by himself - then and then this author and his texts will be in it space of the commons by strangers who seem to be present, but seem to be absent at the same time. Both history and modernity know such strange figures (a not so recent, but strikingly vivid example is Pyotr Smirnov, the absolute pinnacle of modern naive poetry, whose book "Budouin Hills", equipped with a foreword by Alexander Eremenko, completely stunned everyone who came across it, but surprisingly had no consequences, did not have any influence on anyone or anything).

Thus, embarking on the path of responsible literary pursuits (vs. writing for oneself and one’s friends; note that there is no contradiction here with the well-known thesis about the strict privacy of a writer’s activities: it is private in the sense that it is not subordinated - should not be subordinated - to current social needs and compulsions - but this privacy has a reverse side in contact with eternity), the subject is faced with the need to share this very common property. There are a lot of them : over 40 years!

Alexander Kushner spoke and wrote about something similar more than once, explaining why, from his point of view, there cannot be bright and original young authors today: there are too many, compared to the Pushkin era and even the “Silver Age”, we must first master in order to then break through to identity. This is both true and not true. We must understand that the legacy left to Pushkin or Blok was not much smaller than to us today - it simply included foreign language and foreign cultural texts to a much greater extent. What was really small in the situation of 1820 or 1900 was the volume of the common heritage of contemporary Russian literature, the literature of a given era. In fact, little of anything significant or valuable was created in her at that moment.

Not so now. But to conclude from this that mastering the entire diversity of current literature should take a good ten years seems to me reckless: after all, if we assume that in order to comprehensively cover the current era in poetry, one must have a clear idea of ​​one and a half hundred authors (this, it seems, is not far from truth), then is it really impossible to read a collection of each of them in a day, doing this, roughly speaking, three times a week? Of course, the point is not in the speed of reading, but in the ability to perceive a lot and different things - but this is a purely individual trait, and there is nothing impossible or unthinkable in the presence of such an ability in very young authors.

There are several problems here. Modern man in Russia has been brought up on the categories of confrontation, on the principle “those who are not with us are against us,” leading to a semi-conscious search for “friends,” so that, having found them, together with them they can take up arms against “strangers.” Hence, a common way of entering literature: to quickly look around (this is at best), to discover almost the first attractive artistic or ideological landmark that comes along - and at this point the process of self-identification is considered complete: everything else is considered hostile or insignificant. The introduction into cultural consciousness of such a system of ideas and value orientations, in which the categories of integrity of space, diversity, and variability of development paths would serve as a support and basis, is not an easy and very urgent task. On the other hand, a space substitution syndrome arises: a group of people, not knowing about the existence of everything that exists, or pretending not to know about it, builds a certain separate world with its own hierarchy of authorities and value system, loudly declaring or silently believing that he is real, but nothing else seems to exist (or it is from the evil one). Many people have before their eyes, for example, the activities of the top of the Moscow Writers' Union, headed by Rimma Kazakova, or the situation at the Literary Institute, or the state of affairs in the literary part of the Russian Internet: their own classics and their own young geniuses have been appointed, various internal structures are being formed with greater or lesser success ... It would not be a problem - but for an author taking his first steps towards integration into the literary space, all this can be quite, sometimes irrevocably disorienting.

In general, the problem of orientation in the avalanche-like growing flow of new texts has more than once been declared one of the main cultural problems of both the passing and the coming centuries, and it is clear that the only way to cope with it is to structure the space of culture as much as possible, to institutionalize the various processes occurring in it. In this regard, the activity of creating metatexts acquired such enormous importance in the second half of the century (ahead, as in a number of other general cultural processes, was the visual arts, in which the figure of the gallery owner became almost central back in the 60s and 70s). With regard to literature: it is difficult to overestimate the role that a magazine editor, the compiler of a book series, the curator of a literary club, the organizing committee of a literary prize can play in the arrangement of the literary space - if, of course, they pursue any consistent, conscious line in their activities, if the project they are implementing is conceptual.

And this is where we have difficulties. The fact is that the way literary life was organized in the USSR was deliberately anti-conceptual: magazines, publishing houses, and any literary institutions were not supposed to have their own face. In today's Russian literary life, a significant place is still occupied by structures inherited in one way or another from the Soviet era - so they have a hard time with their own identity. Is anyone able to clearly explain how, strictly speaking, the publication strategy of the October magazine differs from the publication strategy of the New World magazine? The bacillus of facelessness turned out to be catastrophically virulent: a whole series of new structures that appeared over the past decade were affected by it from birth; A striking example is the Booker Prize, the characteristic feature of which is that the row of its laureates means nothing; these authors are not united by anything and do not form any coherent picture.

This is an alarming state of affairs, but one can hope that it can be overcome: the basis for such hope can be signs of the literary community’s increasing attention to the problems of structuring and orienting activity in the literary space. The year 1999 ended with two significant events in this sense: the Andrei Bely Prize for special services to literature was awarded to Dmitry Volchek for the publication of Mitya’s Journal - one of the few Russian periodicals that has a completely definite face: supporting certain artistic languages, promoting certain authors and etc. (by the way, the Andrei Bely Prize itself is a unique example of a literary award for Russia with clear objectives and guidelines); At the same time, it was announced that another literary prize, the Little Booker, in 2000 would be awarded for the best literary project - which, as is clearly seen from the Regulations on the Prize , and means activities aimed at arranging, inhabiting the literary space. Increasing the prestige of the work of a literary critic and its role in the literary process is the key to providing every interested person with the best opportunities in mastering the common property of contemporary literature.