Translated material
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn. Kuritsyn-weekly from September 28, 2000
Kuritsyn-weekly from September 28, 2000
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn
Date of publication: September 28, 2000
Vyacheslav Kuritsyn
Date of publication: September 28, 2000
Clubs: Shamanic rituals in "Amplitude" .
The First Likhachev Readings
From September 29 to October 3 (with a break on the 30th and 1st) in the Pushkin House (St. Petersburg, Makarova Embankment, 4, Large Conference Hall) the international scientific conference "Christianity and Old Russian Literature" is taking place. It is also called "The First Likhachev Readings". Death (the number one academic died a year ago) is a powerful thing; there is no longer the slightest desire to discuss the catastrophic decline in the level of D.S.'s work in recent decades, one can calmly bow one's head in memory of a significant scientist.
Here are the reports from the conference program that for one reason or another (the speaker's name or the topic) caught my eye. On the 29th, at the morning session (10:00-16:00), the third (out of eight participants - a very tight schedule, by the way) will be Ilya Serman (Jerusalem) with a report "The Nature of Laughter According to Likhachev", the sixth - Sigurd Schmidt (Moscow) with a report "D.S. Likhachev in the Culture of Moscow", and after him Atsuo Nakazawa (Niigata) will talk about Likhachev's interaction with Japan. The evening session (15:00-18:30) will be opened by Muscovite Valentin Yanin, who will tell about a sensational find - the oldest Russian text on birch bark (older than the birch bark cited in "Native Speech") was discovered in Novgorod. On October 2 at 10:00, Sergei Averintsev will appear, promising the presence of the Omnipresent. Yoshikazu Nakamura from Tokyo is promised to be the sixth in this session with a report on "Nature in the Lives of Saints, Russian and Japanese". Igor Smirnov (Konstanz) is announced as the second at the evening session (that is, at about half past three). The topic is "On Two Types of Versification in Old Russian Literature". Sergei Fomichev (Piter) will close the session - "Gardens in the Poetry of Petersburg". The last session (October 3, 14:30-18:00) will be devoted to the Old Believers and will be accompanied by chants of the Znamenny chant performed by Old Believer singers under the direction of Fr. Leonty Pimenov.
Grigoriev Readings
And in the Tsvetaeva Museum in Borisoglebsky Lane (Moscow) there will be the Apollon-Grigoriev Readings, which are held by the Academy of Russian Modern Literature (I give a link, but the information there has not been updated for three years). They are dedicated to modern poetry (like "neoarchaists or neo-innovators?"). October 6, 16:00, the list of participants is still unknown.
On Pirogov's move to RZh
"Paper Endures" by Lev Pirogov has moved to "Russian Journal". Having made an intricate traverse along the route Guestbook of " Modern Russian Literature with Kuritsyn " - " Observer " - Fry's Reviews - RZh, with stops at "LG" and "Lenin", Pirogov found himself at a crossroads (see the new joke about Ilya Muromets here ). It is necessary to find a middle ground between this lawlessness and this boredom . The first issue in RZh is timid, shy. It begins with frankly marginal messages, which is hardly right for this resource. The next day the tonechanges to a cheerful one, the topic is chosen to be of general significance (fear and fuck), but the litgazeta-like indistinctness comes out of the cracks. Well, trouble is a disaster. As the hero of the occasion himself would have written, "Pirog took his pants out of his fly and went out into a large clearing." Yesterday, by the way, I heard a version that Lev Pirogov is a collective pseudonym of Rubinstein and Prigov. This is not true, Prigov's pseudonym is Olshansky, about which below.
And since we're talking about jokes, here's a positive story I read in the latest Playboy. A boxer pesters a promoter: "Listen, I'm so fucking strong, I can already fight in the next category, I'll beat everyone. But you won't put me in a fight with Julio Paquito! The radio said he's the coolest! I want to fight Julio Paquito!" And the promoter replies: "How many times do I have to explain to you - you are Julio Paquito!"
The bell tolls for you, baby. Ashes beat in the furnace of your heart. All roads lead to the third world. Did your mother love such a one? Such a one, such a one. You are Julio Paquito.
Historical documents on the net
The Cathedral Code of 1649, the manifesto of February 19, the "Land and Freedom" program, 4 Soviet Constitutions, the first city law of Strasbourg, the second city law of Strasbourg...
"And whoever seizes another by the hair or beats him with his fist or in any other way without shedding blood and is convicted of this by two witnesses, shall pay 5 pounds."
This is all in the Library of Electronic Resources of the History Department of Moscow State University , which opened on "Russian Binding".
"Translator" by A.Kariva
About six years ago, having heard some smoke and fire out of the corner of my ear, I wrote something like "Two Israeli journalists have composed a novel about the murder of..." in the newspaper "Segodnya". I don't remember the name of their murdered prime minister. I don't remember what I was illustrating with this phrase either. And the names of these journalists meant nothing to me then. Now they do.
One of them is Anton Nosik. The other is Arkan Kariv, whose story " The Translator " has just appeared in the Moshkov library. It begins with the phrase "With a shuffling cavalry gait in the gaudy Jerusalem scenery, the spring month of Nisan entered Russian speech" and at first glance resembles hundreds of sad and cheerful stories about the life of Russian repatriates in the state of Israel. Jerusalem life, military training, excursions into the Moscow janitor's past. But Kariv's hero smokes marijuana and takes acid all the time, which abruptly changes the situation and sets a ragged, meditative, drawn-out rhythm to the story. Having sat down on a bench on the Garden Ring with a printout of "The Translator", I did not get up for an hour until I was really pressed for work.
It is written softly, easily, wittily. You will learn many pleasant details - "There is a special Jewish fancy verb meaning "covering one's ass from administrative responsibility" .
Alas, the grace quickly ends with a crumpled, unclear ending. A casus. The plot is generally hideous, that is, worthless. And in, so to speak, mythological terms, the run-up is a ruble (a luxurious title, parallels with "The Master and Margarita"), and the impact is a penny. If I were the author, I would increase this text by two times, putting it on the skewer of a solid story, and it would be good with a secret. "Translator" - it should sound proud.
"Karamazov Barracks" by A. Khusnutdinov, "I, He, That" by S. Solovyov
On "Modern Russian Literature" read two intricate stories - " Karamazov Barracks " by Andrei Khusnutdinov and " I, He, That " by Sergei Solovyov. Andrei offers a kind of tape recording of a confession (such a thing, it would seem, by definition cannot exist), masterfully playing with modulations and intonations, Sergei, as earlier in his "Book" , mixes wisdom with poetic prose. There are magnificent pieces.
"Coming out of the hut, with my whole body, I stood knee-deep in a loose paper mess, with my whole body, in this multilingual wastepaper Babylon, looking around: the earth with its larded and plastered trees, right up to the distant newspaper hills, is motionless; a village in a hollow - papier-mâché, crumpled, abandoned halfway; and a heap of sea - like a bird graveyard - walk along it; and above my head - a bloodless, clear sky, without color - look at it: with my whole body, which he, leaving, left for me."
Groys's New Ideas
This is Boris Groys in an interview with Nadezhda Grigorieva (Zvezda). Usually Groys's conversations (writing in German, Boris communicates with the Russian public more often through mediums) are much clearer and more understandable; in this one, a certain confusion is noticeable, constant reservations like "we still need to figure out what conceptualism is" look like self-tests... It seems that Groys is at some kind of a threshold and is preparing to please us with a set of new ideas. In any case, in the interview there are many original concepts that are half or a quarter spoken (by the way, it is amusing to compare Groys's reasoning about the Internet and the archive with Mikhail Yampolsky's "post-archival consciousness" ).
A. Ageev about criticism, I about young poetry
Alexander Ageyev posted his thoughts on the review on the NLO website: it is supposedly the most "critical" of all critical genres, but in our boring times it is poorly used. It is hard to disagree with the first half of the thesis (according to the new rules of Russian languages, they say, it will be like this: "the first half of the thought", but "the first half of the thesis", "the first half of the consideration"), and it is easy to disagree with the second. Ageyev is guided by the practice of thick magazines and, probably, national newspapers, where reviews are really a mess, sloppy and inconsistent (not everywhere, however - in Segodnya Olshansky writes quite well; by the way, their search engine, as it never worked, still doesn’t work, for the word “Olshansky” it gives links to some drilling rigs, but when I typed in “Prigov”, remembering that Mitya reviewed it, it gave me five links to Olshansky’s reviews at once, I don’t know what to think). But in Ex Libris and Novaya Russkiy Kniga , the reviews are all right: not in terms of quality (what’s the point of arguing about the color of other people’s dreams), but in terms of social function. They are a reason and a platform for discussions, they orient the reader, they warm the soul or burn the author's heels, they migrate - as quotations - to the covers of the next books, etc. And with " Vesti-knigi " and " Pole-knigi " everything is fine (it was - one project closed, another is closing, but it happened). I'm not even talking about "Afisha", the reviews in which made Lev Danilkin, who is going through his finest hour (by the way, his scooter was stolen last night) the most... um... useful literary critic.
Well, and for good measure, a link to my article about young poets , written for "Vremya MN". The occasion was an American anthology of Russian poetry (here is a review of it from the latest "Ex Libris").
St. Petersburg: shamanic rituals in "Amplitude"
According to Daria Sukhovey, on September 29 at 7 p.m. the humanitarian studio "Amplitude" opens its season - Ligovsky pr., 53 ("Pushkinskaya 10", front door to the left, 7th floor, the elevator works, that's nice, because it didn't work in the summer). A shaman party "Psychedelics and ethnopsychosis of Russian verse" is promised. The acoustic space is organized with the participation of ethnomusicians Hermes Zaigott and Alexander Sveta (Moscow). I hope to drop by and report to you. The next issue will be devoted to St. Petersburg affairs.