Olga Prokhorova. Games having forgotten yours

Games having forgotten yours
Lev Kassil. Conduit and Schwambrania

Olga Prokhorova

Date of publication: September 15, 2000

As a child, I half-consciously divided books into two categories: those approved by dad and those not approved. In reality, the division was subtler: there were books that dad read aloud to us at night (the cream of the cream, so to speak, from “Carlson” to “Eugene Onegin”); those that he palmed off with a special expression on his face, like a proud collector offering to evaluate a rare wine; those that stood on our shelves, but were not commented on in any way - and so on, right up to some "Angelica", which, although my dad did not take away from me when I was fourteen, masking his displeasure with sarcasm, it was worth overlooking - he hid it under the very ceiling. There were also books that simply weren’t in the house. Perhaps some of them, quite by accident, were not given the honor of standing on the shelves of their father’s huge library. But the very absence of them in the house was significant for me. Reading them was a little bit of betrayal - so, overcoming remorse, I borrowed “The Fourth Height” from the school library four times and secretly shed unshared tears over Gulya Koroleva.

So I took “Conduit and Schwambrania” to read in a certain friend’s house. The son of our dacha acquaintances (we were neighbors for only one summer), let’s call him Mitya, was, according to the adults, partial to me, and we were six years old. Therefore, a one-time attempt was made to make us friends in the city, for some reason I was separated from my brother and taken to visit. It was there that I acquired Schwambrania and never returned it. And the publication was gorgeous - on ivory-colored paper, with maps and other bells and whistles, and most importantly - in some kind of leather-like red binding (this is why our poodle liked it many years later and was shamelessly eaten under the sofa).

My vague feelings about this book, in addition to its foreign origin, were aggravated by my tense relationship with the aforementioned Mitya. At the dacha, in the hut our dad built, he offered my brother and me a terribly stupid game. We had to take turns taking off our pants and showing each other's butts. A couple of times we followed his lead, but for us, who had recently bathed in the same bathtub, mutual butts were not a novelty, and Mitina was not interested, so Sasha and I soon began to refuse. This didn’t bother Mitya at all, he simply turned his back to us, pulled off his underpants and invariably said: “Politics demands this!” The game itself also began to be called “Politics”. When the parents found out, they had a lot of fun. (The most amazing thing is that several years ago I saw Mitya on TV. He was conducting some kind of political review.)

I remember I liked “Schwambrania”. The golden childhood of two doctor's sons was so similar to my own - with inventing cities and countries, playing music and secrets. How many common signs do √ have in common with the hidden grotto with the Swambran chess queen (for us, the role of the hiding place was a cavity in the parquet floor in the corner of the nursery, leading to the oak ceilings and covered with a copper lattice, and the role of the secret was a porcelain pot with a tiny Cinderella’s shoe, left over from a lost foreign doll ), and maps of fantastic continents - I remember that in the Far East we had Cape Western. And the main thing is that the Schwambran world was as different from the life of the sleepy provincial Pokrovsk as my brother’s life was different from the childhood of children from the yard, who lived, perhaps, quite well - but somehow inseparable from the words “May Day” or “ October". While for us school and other official attributes were more like a boring dream.

In a word, it seemed unfair to me that dad only shrugged his shoulders when I asked his opinion about this book.

Since then, I have long been convinced that my father’s preferences and prejudices can differ from my own, and although I internally divide books into those that “come from childhood” and all others, it is much less categorical. If dad liked reading Hans Fallada's fairy tales to us and didn't like Alice in Wonderland, then Carroll is not to blame. Therefore, when collecting a library for my nine-year-old son, I happily bought “Schwambrania” and encouraged him in every possible way to read; Soon he came running to tell me Oska’s jokes about “blind eyes” and “bicycle men . ” And I myself wanted to revive my childhood memories.

At first everything went well. The style is reminiscent of Dovlatov. It is clear that all the stories about Shvambrania are based on true memories - that is why small “untruths” especially stick out, like the list of “injustices” compiled by Lelya and Osya: “Not all adults rule life, but only those who wear uniform caps, good fur coats and clean collars" - and other blizzards to please the regime. If a child can mark a uniform cap on an adult’s head, then he can distinguish a good fur coat from a bad one, and even more so a clean collar from a dirty one - thank you! But these are, of course, trifles.

However, the further I read, especially when I passed the middle of the book, the more the feeling grew that Lev Kassil was seriously playing “politics” according to the rules of my friend Mitya and could no longer stop. There is a revolution and confusion in the big world; in Schwambrania, King Brenabor also “renounced a little . ” That would be fine. As I read, I began to realize that I didn’t remember the ending of the book completely and it was starting to scare me. Apparently, in childhood, my eyes indifferently slid past the pathetic pages describing Lenin’s illness and the grief that gripped the whole of Pokrovsk on this occasion (we were vaccinated against all this rabies regularly at school, but after repeated discussions of this topic, it was not touched). And now the immune system has been exhausted and it has become a shame to read slightly hysterical lies.

But these are, in the end, my personal problems. It gets really scary closer to the end - starting from the moment when the seductive girl Donna Dina flies into the book. She arouses the adoration of her pure-hearted cousins ​​- the “grasshoppers ,” as she calls them, Lelya and Osi. It is she who, with the sophistication of Milady, begins to eradicate Schwambrania from their lives. Step by step, she pushes them towards betrayal, gradually involving a whole team of kids in this politically important matter. It is not easy for the boys to realize the immaturity of their game... They have difficulty overcoming their attachment to their “ideal” country. But thanks to the support of the team, which is skillfully led by the young communist Dina, the guys understand that their young hot hearts, their young strength are needed for real work for the benefit of the young Soviet state.

But the one I will never forgive Kassil is Oska. Little, wise Oska, who asked the question : “Is our cat also a Jew?” , who confused a prodigy with an underwood, and sperm whales with chocolats, turn into a vile NKVD officer? Prohibiting the making of a Schwambran speech over the cradle of a newborn daughter, unconvincingly, for the sake of formality, confusing a madrigal with a hamadryl? “Here,” said Oska, opening his notebook. “This is what I wrote down here (this is an extract from his book “The Communist’s Companion.” - O.P. ) : “And if they say: well, what do we care about all this, after all we do not need any illusion, no deception... This is our great happiness. But does it follow from this that we... do not need any dream?.. And this is no longer an unattainable fantastic star, no longer a comforting chimera. This is simply our very plan, our very five-year plan and further super-five-year plans... That’s what should have been said,” concluded scientist Oska.” .

My dad was right. Scary book.

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By analyzing literary and fan sites on the Runet, one can get a good idea of ​​the generational structure of active domestic Internet users and their preferences. For example, the site “ All children's books on the Runet. Veselaya Library ” is really very extensive, with links to many texts. There are almost no folk tales there, and there is no “Soviet” children’s literature - the same as “The Fourth Height”; but everything that even remotely resembles science fiction is widely represented, from Belyaev to Bulychev. “ Conduit and Shvambraniya ” still exists - in Rostov-on-Don.

But there was also some fantasy: in a brief information about the writer, the author, hiding behind the initials Vl.B., connects “Conduit and Shvambrania” with their invented world with the tradition of fantasy and recalls Kassil’s science fiction story “Three-Headed Fate. Phantascheme” ( 1936), in which the Earth managed to avoid a collision with an asteroid (wasn’t this the story where the authors of two parallel 1998 Hollywood films about total Armageddon drew inspiration ? Observant film critic Yuri Gladilshchikov noticed that the recent film with Al Pacino “On Any Sunday” - Any Given Sunday is a definite remake" Goalkeeper "according to Kassil's script).

The Russian Cultural Heritage Network presents the L.A. Kassil Museum - with such exhibits, for example: L.A. Kassil’s dedicatory inscription to an unknown woman: “Dear Nina Ivanovna - a certain result of her sleepless nights, full of the crackling sound of my typewriter. 10.24.1947. Lev Kassil " .

There was also a treatise by a certain Yakov Iosifovich Tsoukernik - which was spelled out exactly like that, in full, even inside the TITLE tag. It's called " Three Commissars of Children's Literature (Gaidar, Kassil, Krapivin) " (about Kassil separately - here ). As far as I understand, the author believes that commissariat is good; and that Gaidar and Kassil knew how to rock, but Nosov’s kids - both real and from the Flower City - were shredded compared to Timur (who, as it turns out, was supposed to be Duncan), so all hope is in Krapivin. Painfully straining my memory, I remembered a certain “Lullaby for my brother” from the magazine “Pioneer”: how the kids built some kind of caravel, or something. Such a masculine, commissar's occupation. This is not the incubator from "The Merry Family". The trouble—perhaps my personal one—is that Nosov’s books could be read and reread ad nauseam, but “Dunno” gave birth in the minds of several generations of children to a whole virtual world that developed according to its own laws; I was never able to defeat Krapivin.